STEWARDS:

Ag Video Thursday: A brief overview of tomato genetics.

2011-04-21T09:00:00.006-04:00

In preparation for our next profile, Monsanto tomato breeder Doug Heath, we thought we'd give you a quick prep on genetics.

The first is entertaining, put out by a group in Europe called EU-Sol, entitled "Genetics 2.0- Tomatoes Having Sex."

The second is a student video from Oregon State that gives a 3-minute summary of how a cross is made between male and female plants. A hybrid tomato is made by crossing two tomato plants with fixed genetics, known as "parents." I believe that there is some misconception out there about hybrids. I must stress that hybridization is completely unrelated to genetic engineering. It is simply a controlled process that allows breeders to consistently offer traits such as disease-resistance, yield, color, etc. Seeds are rarely saved because they will not reproduce consistently; it's a natural result of the process.

Third is song. While trolling for a good video summary of genetics, I found this great one about Gregor Mendel, a song by a group called Moxy Fruvous from Toronoto.

Finally, if you'd like a more in-depth, brief lecture (6 minutes) on tomato genetics, the last video is of a researcher, Dr. Harry Klee at University of Florida discussing the process of tomato crossing and molecular biology. He discusses molecular markers, which allows breeders to see inside the tomato's DNA and see if they have achieved a desired cross. That process can cut years off of research and development, but still uses classic breeding methods. If it's been awhile since your Biology 201 class, I recommend it as an update.

Enjoy! Genetics and tomatoes...two of my favorite things.

Ag Video Thursday: The American Farm Bill explained on a TEDx Talk

2011-04-14T07:35:00.001-04:00

The gigantic and confusing political document that governs agricultural spending in the United States is called the Farm Bill. Every 4 or 5 years a new bill is voted upon, and every edition makes many people nervous.

You've heard of farm subsidies? Those come out of the Farm Bill. They effectively pay a fund to farmers who grow crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans, our large commodities. Subsidies often receive a negative opinion in the media, especially from people who support small, diversified farms. In the Midwest, however, these subsidies are what keep farmers and towns in business. Our last post, on Ken Warren from The Land Institute, touches on that.

But the Farm Bill covers much more than that; most of its monies actually go to Food Stamps and other food-related economic support.

In this 13-minute TED Talk, Ken Cook explains the breakdown of the last bill, and makes some proposals for a rearrangement of its focus.

Salina, Kansas: Ken Warren, The Land Institute

2011-04-11T21:02:00.005-04:00

I grew up in Manhattan, but went to the farm quite a lot and I always enjoyed that. My background really is very very scattered. I’m a geologist by training and spent some time on the dark side. Worked for oil companies in Alaska and so forth, was involved in one of the real early wells on the North Slope. Then, through a real strange bit of twists and turns, I ended up in the investment banking business and spent about 25 years in there, pretty much detesting every moment of it.

And one time when I came back for an alumni meeting, because I do have a degree from K-State as well, one of the people that I respected there met me at the airport and said, “you’re not really coming to this meeting are you?” And I said, “look, I didn’t fly back here just for the fun of it. What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, there’s a fellow over in Salina that I think you ought to meet." I said, “Look, I grew up in Manhattan; nobody smart ever came from Salina.”

He said, “Ah, well that’s the way it is, is it? Well, in that case, I’m not even taking you into town, we’re going directly to Salina and you can meet Wes Jackson.” He told me about Wes Jackson on the way over. That was in the very early days here.

If farming could be compared to Hollywood, it would be easy to pick out the celebrities. There's controversial Joel Salatin, hippie successful Eliot Coleman, popular Michael Pollan, and there's the sexy old timers Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. When you hear a speech or read an essay by one of these farming heavy hitters, the average joe is inclined to listen and listen good- they obviously know what they are doing. The Land Institute, founded by Jackson, is a place in the middle of the country that acts as a hub for these progressive thinkers, writers, and workers.

The Land Institute is best known for its work towards perennializing grain crops. What does that mean? At its simplest, it's an attempt to change our crop habits from annuals (plant the corn, grow the corn, harvest the corn, repeat) to a prairie-like diversified system. A farmer would harvest multiple crops at once from a complex prairie of edible grains, but would not have to replant because they are perennials; their roots keep them alive and they re-sprout on their own the following year.

Travis and I were deep in the heart of summertime Kansas when we pulled up on August 2nd. There we met with Ken Warren, managing director of The Land Institute. It was nice to hear a voice other than the prolific Wes Jackson's, and Ken is a passionate conversationalist and scientist in his own right.

Ken sat with us and gave a full tour of the property for a very pleasant few hours while he explained the issues of perennializing wheat and other grains. Ken is a great presenter and he pulled out all the stops for Travis and I, explaining that the average American gets 70% of his/her calories from grains as he kicked out a 20-foot-long poster across the floor depicting the massive root system of wheat that has been perennialized. Wheat that is in the field for more than a year has a HUGE root system, let me tell you. We saw another example of this later on in the visit when Ken drove us out to the plots of wheat and we climbed down into a pit that had been excavated to give a great visual of the root system of a grand-daddy wheat plant.

You might wonder what the benefits are of perennialized food. The cost of growing it would be much much less, as farmers would be spared the yearly seed and planting expenses, and much of the fertilizer/equipment/fuel expense. That would translate into lower prices at the grocery store or bakery. Erosion control in one of the home states of the dust bowl would be mightily enhanced by the ever-growing root systems these plants have to offer, and perhaps all the doomsday predictors who say we'll be starving by 2050 could come to the conclusion that food that keeps on growing without being tilled/plowed/worked/etc. could provide bread in the face of upcoming disaster.

There is a popular saying that Trav and I saw on billboards in middle America that went something like this: "Every farmer feeds 129 Americans." Wendell Berry responded to that with "well, you'd have to slice them pretty thin." Ken quoted that to us and imparted his belief that farming is an incredibly risky act and farmers are the biggest gamblers, with the most to lose, in our society. Shouldn't they (and we) have the benefit of growing food that will keep giving instead of re-buying it every year?

We asked Ken, as we asked all farmers, what the role of the farmer should be in our society:

First of all, he’s gotta be more interactive. Farmers don’t even talk to each other! We have a farmer that works with us who really does understand controlling inputs. In fact he has a pickup truck he calls Herb because he bought it with herbicide savings. He doesn’t feel comfortable talking to his neighbors about his methods, although he knows that per acre he makes more money than they do, and is probably lots better for the environment than they are.

Wheat isn't the only crop that is being bred and crossed for perennializationmilo), sunflowers, and corn are included. One of the tenets of The Land Institute is that a diverse crop has a much greater chance of being healthy. Ken struggles with getting more input from farmers themselves about what they'd like to see, and when the day is done, what they'd actually buy. He lamented that most farmers "are not a chatty bunch."

We asked him a question that Trav had wondered for some time. How does a perennial system respond to the argument that we need to increase yields of all crops to "feed the world" in the coming years?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I don’t know how you do that. I mean, it frightens me that every 15 days we add to the population of this planet the size of the population of this state. And when I think about that I just think, “there’s no way!”

Of all things that give me a real start, thinking about the hope for the future, that’s one that really is a sobering one. And if you don’t bring it up, people always say, “eh, well, have you considered population growth??” “We considered population.” “What’re you doin’ about it?” “What am I doing about it?” Preaching. I don’t know what else to do.

Ken also is a bit frustrated and was candid with his doubts and concerns about the perennialization process. He spoke of the struggling Plains farmers and the booming world population.

Farmers can’t live right now without the subsidies. Back when those diesel fuel prices went crazy, it was really close out here for a lot of them.

They didn’t realize, I think, that the last of diesel fuel is not gonna be running a tractor, it’s gonna be in a Hummer limousine going somewhere. They really got to thinking about that. And they got to thinking, “you know, we can’t afford to irrigate this corn anymore, ‘cause we’re up against it, takes a lot of energy to do that.” So what happens? Ethanol raises its ugly head. And it makes all of that thing profitable again. And they go back to their old habits.

The real thing you’d like to see happen is more of that money go back to the farmer. And stay in their pockets and stay in their communities. That’s probably as big a dream as any.

How does a town like this one live if trucks don’t come down the interstate? We don’t know how to grow food. What would we do? We used to have a diversified support system around here. Today’s paper, always does, has a little column that goes back 25, 50, 75, 100 years. You read about those things and you realize what we lost here.

On a final note, if there is anyone out there who does think of farmers in celebrity terms then prepare yourself to feel a twinge of jealousy- Trav and I did exchange hello's and how-do's with Wes Jackson. As we wrapped up our interview with Ken, a middle-aged, dirty-from-the-fields man walked in the door and asked us if we needed anything, which we didn't, but it was nice of him to offer. He sure looked like he could stand a glass of ice water to survive the ups and downs of mimicking the perennialized American prairie.

A summary of "Why Perennial Grain Crops?" can be found on The Land Institute website, here.

Click on the jump below to read most of the interview, including discussion of genetic diversity, the difference between traditional breeding and genetic engineering, and some sobering thoughts on how farmers in Kansas are faring. He also goes into detail of the process of combining modern annual wheat with its perennial cousin.

KEN WARREN, THE LAND INSTITUTE: FULL INTERVIEW

I grew up in Manhattan, but went to the farm quite a lot and I always enjoyed that. My background really is very very scattered. I’m a geologist by training and spent some time on the dark side. Worked for oil companies in Alaska and so forth, was involved in one of the real early wells on the North Slope. Then, through a real strange bit of twists and turns, I ended up in the investment banking business and spent about 25 years in there, pretty much detesting every moment of it.

And one time when I came back for an alumni meeting, because I do have a degree from K-State as well, one of the people that I respected there met me at the airport and said, “you’re not really coming to this meeting are you?” And I said, “look, I didn’t fly back here just for the fun of it. What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, there’s a fellow over in Salina that I think you ought to meet. I said, “Look, I grew up in Manhattan; nobody smart ever came from Salina.”

He said, “Ah, well that’s the way it is, is it? Well, in that case, I’m not even taking you into town, we’re going directly to Salina and you can meet Wes Jackson.” He told me about Wes Jackson on the way over. That was in the very early days here.

This place started in 1976, when Wes pretty much left a tenured position down in Sacramento State running one of the first environmental science programs in the country. He came back here because he understood the futility of that. So I met Wes. And I didn’t think a lot about that but then I was in the east coast for a little while for a meeting. I was also part of the New Alchemy community there, and Wes was giving a talk, so I just went down. Missed another meeting. Heard Wes, and you know…I just…he’s the Pied Piper. He really is.

I always kind of enjoyed thinking about this place. Then in the mid-80’s I moved back into Kansas City and became more of a regular visitor here. In about ’95 I finally asked Wes what it costs to work out here. So he made me an offer that I’m still working off payments on. And so I came out here and have been here about 16 years now almost.

My real interest was just…coming from a farming background I could see that the way we were doing farming was pretty much totally destructive. I was particularly interested in the water angle because as a geologist I understood what we were doing to the aquifers and so forth. And to the soils. So I was sure that the methodology suggested by Wes in his vision was correct. I was not sure we could pull it off here.

And I’m still not. We’re still at that phase of trying to figure out if this will really work. But I knew that if it could be perfected, there was not one kind of objection you could make to industrial agriculture that this model would not fix.

What’s your role here now?

I’m the managing director. That position’s largely…things that people don’t want to do. I don’t do much in the way of fundraising but I do run the day to day operations and I give a fair amount of presentations every year. That’s my major role; sort of a backup for Wes when he’s on one of his numerous trips. And I do things like organizing the annual festival we have each year.

What’s that like?

Well, it’s like something you wouldn’t quite believe. I’m always amazed by it. We have anywhere between 600 and 1000 people here in the barn. And we’ve really had some of the most prominent speakers. You could name somebody that’s been on the front page of the foodie kind of movement, they’ve been here! It’s just remarkable, an outing for 3 days.

So you said that you’re not quite sure if this can be pulled off here. Do you mean you’re not sure if it can be pulled off or it needs to be spread out into other climates?

It definitely needs that. I think we’re fairly certain that we can do some things with individual perennial crops. Whether we can meet the total vision of being a pure mimic of the prairie…and I don’t mean pure; I mean a functional mimic of the prairie with mixed cropping systems on a landscape…I’m not sure.

We are moving toward some crops that I think have good promise. To give you a little idea of the kinds of approached we’re taking: When Wes put this vision together of course, he thought of the prairie as his model, which for Kansas it’s not very hard to think about. As we started looking at that, it made absolute sense. Here you have this very diverse system that honors conservation and biodiversity, it runs on sunlight, rain, and it protects soils.

But the thing about this whole idea of making an agricultural system that looks like the prairie is it has one glaring weakness. And that is that prairie plants as a whole have seed structures that are not very spectacular. There’s not many seeds there and they’re darn small. So that part of the vision was particularly weak given that 70% of our calories come from grains.

If I came to Wes with that kind of an objection, I’m sure he would say, “Well, I forgot you’re a geologist; I’ll speak more slowly.” And he’d say that the thing you need to remember is, of the 13 major grain crops, 10 have perennial relatives. So annual wheat {pulls out some dried grains} for example, here’s it’s perennial relative. If I wanted to think about perennializing crops and growing them in mixtures, that’s a biological problem.

Your other response would probably be, “if you’re going to create a new species just by crossing these two plants, it’s gonna take a long time.” And of all of the objections that are hard to overcome in plant breeding, the time one is one that’s hard. Monsanto’s taken a few shortcuts, but that doesn’t appeal to us. The whole process…even taking wheat and making a new variety of it can take 10-12 years. So perennialization is a slow process. And it’s very laborious.

This whole photo essay here shows that, for example, wheat, if left to its own devices, even planted next to its relative, is not going to cross out very easily because it’s self-pollinating. So to get the hybrid started takes a lot of just plain hard work. Then, because that first cross is not between close cousins, that means that you have to actually extract the embryo from a seed that would not grow otherwise, and grow it out. So getting that breeding process going for hybrid wheat is very time consuming, expensive. Wheat is a crop that has to go through a winter, so you have to kind of convince it every now and again that it’s winter. Even now we’ve got plants we’re convincing it’s winter, in cool chambers. The only way to speed this process up is to get an extra generation or two each year.

{shows us a board with various stages of sorghum crossing}

Sorghum you may not know real well. It’s called milo. Kansas grows more than any other state in the country. The problem with sorghum, in my way of thinking, is that it’s mostly fed to animals. We’re working with sorghum of food-quality. Food-quality? Where?! Well food quality-mostly in the tropics. It’s an absolute human staple in Africa and so forth. Makes a great flatbread. It has no gluten, so is used in this country in things like gluten-free beer.

But this nasty perennial weed here, Johnson grass, is a close cousin. So you can see as you start picking up the first crosses between these, you start getting more and more yield. So this would take you up through about F4. So 4 crosses will get you into that kind of a level of seed growth {points to a plant on the chart with significantly more seeds than Johnson grass}. Then you start hybridizing that back against the annual and you start picking up more and more grain in the process.

Out of this process you’re starting to see some product that starting to look more and more like grain sorghum itself, and it overwinters. Here. It overwinters here. We have several families of sorghum—by that I mean 400—that are perennial. And the really nice thing about perennials is the long growing season, which allows them to come up earlier than our annuals are planted, they develop a good root system, and they’re more resilient to things like drought around here. So the longer the growing season, probably the better off you are in this kind of a climate.

These are the kinds of process that we’re doing that got things rolling. Now, it’s quite probable and possible to take this small-seeded plant, which is, by the way, called intermediate wheatgrass, and when you cross it with a plant with large seeds you can get good-sized seeds as the hybrid. Problem is, those don’t reliably grow when we plant them in plots. The reason is that the annual nature of this plant means that this time of year, when it gets as nasty as it is right now {late July}, that plant has a very difficult time getting through the summer. It’s used to being dead! Harvested, gone! That’s the problem with this particular degree of hybridization.

Are there solutions to that? Well there are solutions. Keep it up! Maybe out of 1000 seeds that you plant, 10 plants will grow. That’s the good news. You can harvest enough seeds from that. We have sent those hybrid seeds literally around the world…Australia, China, Turkey, Sweden, Canada...for others to grow out and determine the geographic range of this.

So that process is ongoing. We have just hired a new plant breeder who is more into looking at genetic markers on these plants to find out where the genes come from. We do have a means of figuring out where chromosomes come from in these plants through a fluorescent kind of microscopy and there’s even more whiz-bang models than that.

{continues discussion of the science of plant breeding}

The other thing that’s appealing about perennials: Why not just think of this perennial plant a more productive plant on its own? Is there a way to increase the seed yield in this without hybridization? And that’s called domestication.

When we talk about domesticating intermediate wheatgrass, what we’re talking about is raising the yield. Well, what are you going to have? At the end of this you’re gonna have a plant that people have never paid a nickel to eat. So how do you know whether this plant is really going to be a crop plant in the end?

The one kind of thing that is hardest for people to realize, I think, in this agricultural business, is those people are growing lots of things, but the one thing they’re not growing is much grain. When 70% of your calories come from that, somebody’s got to do it. As you go into Western Kansas, those are the somebodies that are doing it! But man, I don’t know for how long.

So, very promising from the standpoint of cereal chemistry. We have used it in baking. It makes good breads, cookies, cakes. A national restaurant chain has used it in some of their outlets as a blend in some of their products. Their customers have reported no difference in taste.

So we have trademarked this particular plant actually, under the name Kernza. We are in the process of increasing its yield. Yeah, but how bad is the yield? The yield’s bad to start with. Wheat, around here…50 bushels an acres, 60 pounds per bushel, 3000 pounds per acre. Kernza…100. So we can increase the yield about 10% every breeding cycle, which is a 2 year cycle. Still incredibly slow.

Farmers realize in this part of the world that they’re up against it. Their product prices have not increased although their energy costs have increased. In some cases they’re worried about competing for things like water. I think in order to make this saleable to farmers, you’ve got to show them that the economics work. I mean you hate to think of farmers being capitalists, but they are. Have to stay in business. So either someone’s going to have to pay a lot per pound for that, or we’ve got to get that yield way up there.

{Discusses cool-season grasses and climate pressure issues when breeding}

You were talking a bit about what it would mean for farmers if this vision was accomplished…what would it mean for non-farmers?

Well…there’s several things it could mean for non-farmers. But were gonna have to change our ways, and that seems to be the hardest part. For example, one of the really interesting things if you happen to believe in eating meat is that this whole situation…after you cut all of this you’ve still got a lot of vegetation on the ground…you could bring in livestock after that and have them graze that residue. An acre of prairie will provide the same amount of beef as an acre of corn does. Cows shouldn’t be eating corn anyway, but…

The problem is, it takes more time. So one of the things they could do is provide for a wholesale change in meat production, but everyone would have to really cur down on the amount of red meat they eat. That could change a lot there.

Not to mention all the farmers with their tradition…

Oh yeah. Now, in Kansas I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find a real diversified farmer. I mean, there was a show done on regional public TV here about a young couple in Nebraska farming. They were literally starving to death on their farm. You wouldn’t think that’s possible. But they’re not diversified enough to grow things like gardens. He went to state university. He learned how to grow grain. But that was about all they grew on the farm.

You know there’s a sign along the highway that you see in Kansas regularly, “one farmer feeds 129 others” or something like that. Well, Wendell Berry says you have slice them awful thin! Because they don’t feed themselves.

The other thing, of course, this means is…the real onus is to try…to try to feed this population that we’ve got. And we aren’t doing it now, so why should we worry. This {perennial cropping} could be used on wider landscape treatments. If you’re gonna take land out of CRP, don’t put it into corn. Put it into a mixed perennial grouping of grain, and then we got a chance of getting some yield. Vandanna Shiva of course, and some others talk about the difference between food and commodities. That’s what you’re seeing as you drive along, there’s a lot of people growing commodities; there’s probably less in this state growing food. We have ethanol plants. You want to listen to commercials on radio, they’ll talk to soybean farmers and say, “you know, even the seat of the tractor you’re sitting on is made out of soybeans.” That’s just sickening! That’s food! A soybean’s a wonderful food product. Let’s get serious here.

I hope that we can keep the grain yields up, but…we’re whistling past the graveyard with that population issue. Oh man, I mean I don’t know how to get around that one. Do you?!

I’d say ever since we headed west and got to about Illinois what we started hearing was “we need to double our production.”

Yep.

“We need to double our yield in order to feed the world.” To anybody that’s not versed in this, or not interested in this, or not willing to consider something different, that’s going to be their first argument.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I don’t know how you do that. I mean, it frightens me that every 15 days we add to the population of this planet the size of the population of this state. And when I think about that I just think, “there’s no way!”

Of all things that give me a real start, thinking about the hope for the future, that’s one that really is a sobering one. And if you don’t bring it up, people always say, “eh, well, have you considered population growth??” “We considered population.” “What’re you doin’ about it?” “What am I doing about it?” Preaching. I don’t know what else to do.

You know, let’s empower women. Women are getting onto the farm in bigger numbers in this country than men. Let’s go back to making it economically possible for those people to have less kids. But…this {Kernza wheat} won’t feed that many people. I’m sure other methods won’t either. Because I don’t know how you get along without soil.

If you can show me that someone’s got a computer prototype replacing soil and water, then all talk to them. But when I read articles about people putting in vertical farming operations in cities, in buildings, I just go, “my gosh, what are we thinking about?” You know the energy require just to get enough light for those plants to grow is more than we can even produce.

We’re gonna get back to a system that somehow involves perennials, I think, whether it’s people that are hunting and gathering up here in the North Pole like people like {James} Lovelock and others believe…I don’t know if we’re gonna get back to that. I’m afraid.

That’d be several billion people hunting and gathering.

Yeah, they’re gonna ravage things pretty fast that way! I just don’t see… Do you have hope yourselves?

Well…yeah, because we can always at least focus on ourselves, which can sound like a cop out, but sometimes I think that that’s what people are going to have to do not long from now.

Yep! Not long is right. And I would say that most folks like us, probably our best coping technique ought to be something to do with shooting your gun, because people have always become raiders when things got short! The word river comes from “rivalis”, people who drink from the same water source. That’s gonna be tough. I hate to think about this, let’s don’t talk about this! {laughs}

I’m curious…from your perspective, not necessarily The Land Institute’s, maybe they’re the same…you said that there’s certain companies out there that are taking shortcuts to breeding technique. And that that doesn’t appeal to you. Why not?

Well, let me say that the reason it doesn’t appeal to me is it’s largely done for short term economic gain and probably the long term biological stability of that…I do have a minor in biology, to be fair, I’m not just a geologist {chuckles}…

When you’re doing all of this shifting of genes you’re a gene jocky anyway. It’s just the long way {points to posters of perennial crossings}…And I think one of the fears that I’ve never really expressed openly very often is that maybe nature’s already tried this and it didn’t work. It’s been around long enough that these things could happen, but I don’t think so because it’s too hard.

Okay, so, if I were to take the genome of annual wheat and spread it out, just like this photo here, and say, “looking at this genome, there are three places on here that appear to tell this plant that it’s an annual.” Well, Monsanto thinks it’s invented the terminator gene. Nature’s had it all along, it’s called an annual plant! So I take those three spots and I turn it off biologically. You’re no longer an annual. Take intermediate wheatgrass, lay out its genome. There’s a perennial gene, there’s one over there. Snatch them up, put them into wheat. Do I have a perennial? Maybe.

Look at the seedhead of intermediate wheatgrass. Look at that seedhead of wheat. I know that seedhead of wheat has one gene that tells it to make that kind of head. It’s called a Q-gene. If I extract that Q-gene and shoot it into intermediate wheatgrass, its relative, will it develop a head like that? If it does, man, I did something pretty neat here. And how do I feel about this when I go to sleep at night? I am shortcutting something that could have happened the long way because I am just taking genes between relatives in the same tribe of plants. So you say, “well, being a rational human being, you’re just rationalizing that.” And I could be. But I think I could sit still for that. And that would shortcut our process probably a great deal. Who knows, because we haven’t tried it.

Again, on a personal level, aside from the work that has been done here in the direct replacement of crops that you’re working on, what would be some ideal changes you would like to see in the ag system?

Wow. Hm…more people on the land. The saddest thing for those of us that are from this part of the world is seeing this landscape withering from the standpoint of humans. One of the problems of course is there’s not many people who care about farming. And Wendell Berry spoke of this in 1977 in The Unsettling Of America, he said the real worry is you’ll get down to the need for farmers and no one’s going to know how to do it. We’re nearly at that point right now.

Farmers are great risk takers. But they’re very risk-averse. Farming is a great risky act, but the county agent comes to them and says, “I’m gonna give you a presecription of the crops you’ll grow this year. Here’s the crop you’re gonna grow, here’s what it’s gonna take to grow that.” Most farmers are gonna do it. Because they can’t take the risk that it won’t work.

So my real worry is that we have gotten so immersed in the corporate ownership of university systems and the landscape; and I don’t mean they own the land. Corporations are too smart to own farms mostly! ‘Cause the yields are too low for them. But they control it. The farmers launder the subsidy money right through to them. Doesn’t stay in town. The joke in Kansas is you can starve a farmer by taking away their mailbox. That’s where their check comes from.

So the changes you’d really like to see made are for farmers to reap more rewards for what they do and be less reliant on people like the government. I worry that someday someone in Washington is going to say “we gotta cut costs someplace. And people have been crying about the subsidies and how the rich get richer and so forth, let’s cut them.” It’s not gonna work. Farmers can’t live right now without the subsidies. Back when those diesel fuel prices went crazy, it was really close out here for a lot of them.

They didn’t realize, I think, that the last of diesel fuel is not gonna be running a tractor, it’s gonna be in a Hummer limousine going somewhere. They really got to thinking about that. And they got to thinking, “you know, we can’t afford to irrigate this corn anymore, ‘cause we’re up against it, takes a lot of energy to do that.” So what happens? Ethanol raises its ugly head. And it makes all of that thing profitable again. And they go back to their old habits.

The real thing you’d like to see happen is more of that money go back to the farmer. And stay in their pockets and stay in their communities. That’s probably as big a dream as any.

How does a town like this one live if trucks don’t come down the interstate? We don’t know how to grow food. What would we do? We used to have a diversified support system around here. Today’s paper, always does, has a little column that goes back 25, 50, 75, 100 years. You read about those things and you realize what we lost here.

Is there anybody growing vegetables around here outside of their own personal garden plot?

Very few. Our farmers’ market has maybe 6 vendors. This is a tough climate.

It’s so amazing for a state that…you know, from the west coast we’ve always been told that this is the breadbasket. And this is where things grow.

Sure. But if that farmer’s gonna feed 129 people you do have to slice them awful thin. It is tough to grow things here. There’s very limited amounts of vegetables grown here. The orchards that were here in some small respect are gone now. Not much is grown.

There is reputedly a person who is going to open a local food restaurant here come September. And I’ll be real interested to see what that looks like.

Bread and corn?

Yeah! Exactly! Here. Can all be eaten a bowl.

00:59:00

Discussion of diversity and monoculture.

1:00:45

What do you think the role of the farmer should be in society?

First of all, he’s gotta be more interactive. Farmers don’t even talk to each other! We have a farmer that works with us who really does understand controlling inputs. In fact he has a pickup truck he calls Herb because he bought it with herbicide savings. He doesn’t feel comfortable talking to his neighbors about his methods, although he knows that per acre he makes more money than they do, and is probably lots better for the environment than they are.

The local arts center here was talking about water issues. The director called me and said, “who would you get on a group like this?” I said, “oh, you need someone from USGS, there’s people there who can help you out, and you need an irrigator.” “What?” “You need an irrigator.” “Why?” “Because unless you’re gonna talk to an irrigator, you aren’t gonna talk about the water at all. And the irrigator need to sit down with the person that you will have who’s probably one of your big donors who waters their yard everyday.”

A farmer will come into town and say, “well they’re irrigatin’ those green lawns up there! That’s a poor use of water!” The yard person will say, “that’s a poor use of water to irrigate those fields.” And they’re both right.

We need to get really interactive with our farmers and they aren’t a chatty bunch. But we need to seek their input and get them involved in trying to make this greater decision. If we can ever get to some sort of ecological accounting, done on a practical basis, not just a statistical basis, I think we could make some real headway, say “what does it really cost to do that?” Cost!

And if we could make decisions based on that we might have a chance of getting some place. And not getting involved with farmers, and I don’t mean at the farmers’ market saying, “Man, I really like that cantaloupe there, that’s really a nice cantaloupe.” I mean getting involved with those people on the landscape, doing the big stuff, getting the mutual concerns out there. I think it’d be really helpful.

There’s a group starting up in Kansas called Kansas Dialogue that attempts to do this. I think it’s really important that we talk about this kind of a thing. I would really like to see farmers, consumers, interested people get together and put the guns away and just talk. It gets awful contentious in a hurry around here.

What’s impressed you the most when you’ve gone out and seen farmers?

On a personal level the most impressive things for me have been…two different things. One would be that people with really nice 3-5 acre diversified plots, a lot of young folks, who have put together a CSA and are very ecologically-minded are supplying 80 families or something. It seems like a great model. There’s been this huge boom of young folks starting farms, small plots, supplying people, I feel like it’s like a baby boomer kind of thing, and I’m curious to see in 10 years how many of them are going to burn out. How many of them are going to keep going, how many are going to get bigger? How that will evolve, because it’s kind of like starting agriculture over in a way.

The other ones that have been really impressive have been 5, 6, 7 generations in, and they’ve got a kid who they think is going to be interested. Whether it’s a dairy or whatever it is. They keep going! Against a lot of odds, especially the dairies who have had it really hard the last couple of years. And a lot of those generational folks, one of the questions that we often ask is “why did you keep farming?” Especially if they’re close to a city where they know land prices went way up. Why are they still doing it? They’ve all got good, very humanist, positive reasons for why.

Did you visit any Amish communities?

Yeah.

That must have been interesting to you.

We interviewed an Amish farmer and a couple of old-order Mennonites in Pennsylvania and Virginia mostly.

{continues discussion of trip, Amish, Percy Schmeiser…}

{Head out for a walk and he shows us more posters and information on the way out}

{Get a tour of facilities, drive around, discuss old and new research}

Kathleen Merrigan On Genetically Engineered Alfalfa

2011-04-07T00:39:00.001-04:00

Have you been paying attention? A lot is going on in the agriculture sector these days, and one of the hottest topics is genetic engineering.

Recently, the USDA deregulated genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa and sugar beets. Many people ar excited about this, and many people (mostly the louder and more public ones) are upset. The list of concerns is long and constant: will GE crops threaten other strains? Is there too much corporate influence in these decisions? Are GE foods affecting our health (or other animals')? Do they really result in less pesticide use? What about herbicide-tolerant weeds?

We plan to begin posting on this blog soon with factsheets about these hot-topic issues. They will attempt to collect pro and con arguments, provide summaries, facts, and questions, and will do so as an unbiased source of information.

I encourage you to see this 2 minute video by Deputy Ag. Secretary Merrigan if you are in the industry. In it she calls for nominations to the USDA's Biotechnology Advisory Committee, a new group to discuss policy around GE crops.

If you are concerned, please consider who you would like representing you in this discussion. If you are in support, same thing.

Meanwhile, look for profiles and interviews later this week with Ken Warren, director of The Land Institute, and Doug Heath, tomato breeder for Monsanto.

Take care!

--Trav--

Nicodemus, Kansas: Florence Howard, 79, retired farmer.

2011-03-22T17:05:00.004-04:00

First we stopped in Bogue. The wide streets seemed like the set of a wholesome movie, with kids splashing away the 100 degree day in a kiddie pool in a front yard; the banker and the postmistress gave us helpful advice about who would be good to talk to for the project in this area. This former railroad town was struggling though, especially since the authorities took the train away a few years back. What is a rail town with no rail?

We went a few miles over to the next township, Nicodemus. It held memories of being a thriving community, though the population has steadily declined to less than 40. We stopped into the museum to check out displays regarding what Nicodemus was like when the first African Americans came here to settle in the mid 1800's (it was one of the homestead towns, to which emancipated slaves relocated). The display that I recall the best was about the first abodes in Nicodemus; there was a lack of wood and folks made there homes in caves and holes in the ground. There was a diary excerpt of a very disenchanted settler who was shocked to see the first settlers coming out of their caves to welcome the new folks.

Nicodemus grew fast in industry and soon the transplants were doing business on main street and the first farmers were trying to make sense of the plains. Every summer there is a big family reunion in Nicodemus for all the town residents (who are mostly related somehow) and their relatives who have since moved away. A man at the museum told us that it's a terrible place to try to score a date; he found out that a woman he had been pursuing all day was his cousin, a few times removed.

The volunteer at the historical society was most helpful in connecting us with the retired farmer, whom they called Miss Florence. After peering out the window at the other side of town (there are only three or four streets, with few trees) she ascertained by which cars were parked who was in, she picked up he phone to call Florence. Not getting any answer did not deter her in the least and she jumped in her car with promises to be right back and sped off to Miss Florence's house. Miss Florence was convinced to come in shortly thereafter and be interviewed by us, and we were grateful to have her unique perspective.

Miss Florence is a vital resident of Nicodemus who looks much younger than her physical years. She and her husband farmed until his death and her retirement about 6 years ago, and her son still farms in the area. She patiently answered all of our questions, and seemed too modest to talk much about any subject that she herself introduced. Discussing her farming life seemed to wear her out. She shone with energy and pleasure though when she talked about fishing in the nearby river. Her portrait is particularly eloquent and beautiful, and I think the look on her face betokens the hard work she's accomplished in her farming life.

When we asked her if she missed farm life, she said, "Oh, yeah. Mmm hmmm. I was lost when I moved back down here. Nothin' to do. Just sit around visiting, go fishin.' Quite a change."

On the biggest issue of being a farmer:

Money. Money to keep it going, you know. One bank we dealt with was real nice, and the other, they got kind of crazy. Found out they finally went under theyself. We had nice neighbors, one thing I was thankful for. There wasn't very many, at that time there wasn't very many black farmers south of here, and they was way older than what we were. Then they all died out and just left us there.

Click below to read the full interview with Miss Florence!

FLORENCE HOWARD:

I was born and raised up on the farm. Been a farmer all my life. I got married in 1950, the guy I married, he was a farmer and a rancher. He passed away in 2005, and I moved down to Nicodemus, been here ever since. We raised cattle, milo, and wheat. Our farm was twenty-five hundred acres, you know, and we had all type of different machinery to work with.

Did you have a lot of help with the farm?

My son. After he got out of college, well, he still stayed around. Finally he got married, I have 3 grandkids and two greats. Well he's still on a farm, but he bought a small farm up there in Oakley. South Oakley, about five miles. He works for Allied Oil Company now... and that's about it.

Do you still live on the farm that you retired from 5 years ago?

I don't farm it anymore.

How did farming change, from when you got started back then to when you finished?

All the different type machinery that you use, fact, years ago they really changed, updated, air-conditioned, radio, and uh, you don't have to get out off of the tractor to put it in the ground, you just press a button and it will go down in the ground, you know... but now they have improved a lot of it. You need to talk to Gil, and Gary. Gil is a big farmer here.

That's just about what everybody we've met said, "talk to Gil and Gary."

Mmmm hmmm. Gary, he farms, but, Gary farms nice, he keeps his ground worked real clean. He has a crop come up and next thing you know, he's out there workin' the crop up, so I don't understand the way Gary farms. But Gil, he's a good farmer.

Do you miss being on the farm?

Oh, yeah. Mmm hmmm. I was lost when I moved back down here. Nothin' to do. Just sit around visiting, go fishin.' Quite a change.

What is it that you miss?

Oh, land. Bein' around livestock. I raised a lot of chicken, turkeys, ducks. Then we had, uh, I raised a lot of hogs too. And cattle. And one time we had 400 head of cattle we raised. The pasture we had, see, was a creek ran through there, and of course we had a couple windmills there. So we had plenty of water for the livestock.

What are the biggest issues that you had to deal with over the years in agriculture?

(Without any hesitation) Money. Money to keep it going, you know. One bank we dealt with was real nice, and the other, they got kind of crazy. Found out they finally went under theyself. We had nice neighbors, one thing I was thankful for. There wasn't very many, at that time there wasn't very many black farmers south of here, and they was way older than what we were. Then they all died out and just left us there.

Is it something you would go back to?

No not at my age.

Maybe just at a small scale?

(Laughs) Well, if I had been close to town, see I was 30 miles from town. But I soon got used to that long drive, you know, back and forth. People out there in Logan County, they own so much land, and, you know, it was different out there than what it is here. They probably own 'bout couple quarter land out there where they own like five or six thousand acres. That put the next neighbor, you know, way away from where you'd be livin.' And that's what the people couldn't understand, why we were so far apart. The neighbor was with the land, the way the land ran, the amount of land they owned, you know. Been quite a few of them, since I've been down here, pass away. So if I would go back out there I'd be lost 'cause they're all gone. With this new generation...

Do you see very many young folks getting into farming?

Well, back there in the 1900's, I could see 'em. But I don't know about here in the two thousands.

Most of the kids moving away?

Mmmm hmmm. Yup. But, it varies in different places. Some say, they say kids are moving back home. They have a better opportunity of getting a job or getting on a smaller farm, and then you take other states, you find where they don't want nothing to do with farming life anymore. I wouldn't mind being on the farm at different times I get to thinking, and then again, I'm glad I'm away from it. 'Cause it's so much confusion anymore going on between the farmers and the people.

What do you mean, they don't get along?

No, they don't get along. A different thing the government should be doing, he's not doing right, so he gets a headache either way he looks at it. Like wheat price. You might have a good wheat crop but when you go to sell the wheat you ain't gonna get nothin' out of that, two dollars somethin' a bushel when you should be up there at six dollars, five dollars a bushel. But it's not. Gasoline's higher. You can't win for losing all the time.

What would be some other changes you'd like to see in agriculture, might help farmers out?

Well, mostly the price! Everything seems like it's going down. Somebody still in farming, like Gil and Gary, they could answer that question better than I could.

Did you feel pretty supported over the years? By your community?

Oh yeah, mm hmm. Out there in Logan County, in Oakley, people were more supportive than what they were down here. Did you live on a farm?

Mmm hmm, small farm in Oregon.

What did you raise?

Just vegetables mostly, herbs. We were surrounded by dairy farms, and my parents just did veggies, and they've still got it, they're not really farming it anymore, but they still live there. We're heading back to Oregon now.

Well it's a shame the way you can ride all over this part of the country and see nice farms just sitting out there, going to rag. So many homeless people, it's a shame how the government do the farmer, don't put enough help for him to hold onto the farm, you know. And I know out there in Oakley there's a lot of 'em lost their farms to the ranches. If I had it all over to do, I don't know whether I'd go back on the farm or not. One day I'd think about if I was younger I wouldn't mind it and thinking I'd get some wellness built from it, you know.

Do you feel like you were appreciated as a farmer?

Mmmmmm....

By the community, or by people who were not farmers?

Mmmmmm, yeah, in a way.

(Door opens, male voice says "excuse me" and Florence comments on how hot it is outside)

It seems like kind of a rough place to be a farmer, especially before all that air conditioning and everything, extreme seasons...

You have to have good will power to stay in farming. If you're not strong, it is nerve racking.

What were the hardest years for you on the farm?

In the summer, when all of them hail storms come up, we'd be getting near harvest, and the hail storm come through and just wipe you out clean, that was hard. And, in the fall, for the milo crop sometime you'd have an early freeze, it might damage the milo crop. You wouldn't get it all. Same way with corn crop. We had bad corn crop where we got hailed out while it was growing, before it had matured out, you know. It takes a lot of nerve to be a farmer.

What do you imagine the future farming being in this area? Do you think anyone else is going to come in?

(Sighs) I doubt it. Might be a few, might think about coming back, after their retirement. But they have to have a good retirement to come back here to live. The price of everything, you know.

What was it like being a woman farmer?

It's a man's world. It's a man's world alright, but there's a lot of women involved in farmin' along with they husbands. Out there in Oakley, you see women out there runnin' the tractors, drivin' the truck, and some would be foolin' around with the dairy, you know with the cow and the milk and all like that. Practically all of them out there in Logan County, the women be out there helpin' they husbands, working the fields and everything. We didn't have no dairy, you know, milk cows or nothin,'we just ran straight. About workin' the field, I drove the tractor many days. I enjoyed it.

Did you do other work besides farming?

That's what I done, farming. I didn't work out or nothin' like that. Back there then, I raised a bunch of chicken, you could sell eggs, we had about 3 milk cows, and different ones that didn't have cows they would come by and buy cream, you know they would churn for butter and stuff like that. That's what I done. I sold eggs all the time.

What did you do for fun?

We had a little club 'round here in the country, an organized womens club... it was more like a sewing club... sewed aprons and dresses, and little bit of everything. That went on every month... and then I joined a club over in Garden City which was 15 miles from me, and they would have club meetings about every month. So I kept myself busy. Well when I wasn't goin' to club meetings I was goin' fishin,' I like to fish. I didn't spend no lonely days out there.

What were winters like?

Cold. We burned, uh, butane, and we got the butane from a little town called Winona, Kansas... and then Scott had a Co-op and my husband changed and went with the Co-op. They would bring the gas out and fill up the 500 gallon tank, you know, butane.

What do you think the role of the farmer should be in society?

I... wouldn't know. That would have to be answered from Gil or Gary.

What role did you play as a farmer? Why did you choose farming?

Pass away time, sometimes. And then sometimes I would do it when my husband had to go to some kind of farm meeting in town. What little I could do to help, I would do it, which he appreciated. And as for our son, got out of high school, went to college in Garden City, and after he got out of college, well, my husband just turned the farm over to him, he loved farmin' life now. We had over a thousand acre farmland, along with the pasture, you know.

Is it hard to not be on the farm?

I don't pay any attention any more. It was kind of strange when I moved back here, you know, missin' the farm, missin' my husband, but...that's somethin' you never get over with. But I just keep on keepin' on, tryin' to do the best I can, all I can say.

I have a son and a daughter. My son lives south of Oakley, on his little farm. And my daughter, she live in San Jose, and she just left this morning to go back to California. She had to go back to Denver and catch a flight back. This is where I was born and raised up at. Came back where I came from.

Does race have any bearing on farming? Why?

Some of 'em didn't have an opportunity to be a farmer, and the ones that had the opportunity, they just couldn't deal with farming life, so they move on to the city, where they ended up at. And it was hard for black people to get ahold of land anyway, and the one that did get ahold of it was just lucky. Now see, Gil, he's the biggest black farmer here in Nicodemus, I'm not going to say Brim ? County 'cause there's just three, four...five black farmers here. There's one black farmer down in Rooks County. Gil, and Gary, and then Nevin I think is three. But it's other black farmers has land here, but they don't live here, they have the land rented out, see. And now Gil, I don't know how much land he farmed, but he farmed a lot of rented land along with what he owned. He's one of the lucky ones, his grandfather had land, and left it to his son, and then his son inherited what he had, see... makes a difference, somebody hands something down to you and you don't have to struggle to try to get hold of something, you know. I think Gary only had a quarter of land, 60 acres. A section being 640 acres. Gil, he really have hit it lucky, once he started hitting the oil wells, they've got, I think, 5 oil wells on his property out north of here. Only him and his sister out north on the farm. She lives, I guess you could say a mile away from Gil, and I think there's an oil well close to her and the rest is scattered kindly over on the other side from Gil's house. So that's a great help. He be kicking out about $5,000 a well a month. Of course, I forgot about Earl Schveitzer, he has one oil well on his property. Earl's kind of going downhill, I think he's about 78 years old now.

(Angela- museum curate- comes in and we introduce ourselves and talk about the disconnect between farmers and consumers)

If things don't change we'll be right back in the dirty thirties. Price keep dropping down... go to the grocery store, keep going up! It's going to be rough for those who are starting out on account of machinery is outrageous, you know, the price, and getting started is hard. Less they can get a loan to operate and go from there.
(Giving us tips about other farmers)

There's another farmer, a young boy, in his fifties... Randy Rose... I know quite a few other farmers... I don't know. You think you have the answer for different things and you don't, you know. It's a hard life out there anymore.
What you hear people say they enjoy about coming to Nicodemus is that it's so quiet, peaceful, you don't hear sirens and all that kind of crap, you know. Plenty of deer, some mountain lions. I know when I go fishing around these little ponds, and a big bunch of trees, you know, surrounding me, I'm looking from one side to the other, see if anything going to come out. I keep my car parked close where I could run to it. I've been catching channel cats, and oil heads, I wouldn't know a bass if I caught one.

Nicodemus, Kansas: Gil Alexander.

2011-03-16T18:34:00.001-04:00

I want to be a good farmer, but I also want to be a good steward too...but I’ve got a banker I’ve got to satisfy too, so I’ve got to grow those bushels.

It was hot and dry in Kansas. And it had been dry for some time. The farmers here in dryland counties were struggling, having no irrigation infrastructure, and with drought years fresh in their memories.

As we traveled and made connections, looking for interesting people to talk to and farms to visit, at some point we called Edgar Hicks of the Kansas Black Farmers Association. Groups and associations often gave us terrific leads and introduced us to farmers that we would never have met otherwise. Edgar encouraged us to drive to Nicodemus, Kansas, a town 40 miles from the nearest interstate. When we looked it up on a map, we saw a tiny footprint of 3 or 4 streets upon a backdrop of fields. In Kansas, in farm country, the roads around the fields are set in one-mile-square grids.

There we met a number of great people, and learned about this historical community, the "only remaining western town established by African Americans during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War" according to its website. The current population is roughly 40. More on Nicodemus in the next post.

We met Gil Alexander, whom multiple people insisted we contact. We met him on his farm in the evening, as the sun was getting low. Thunderclouds were forming suggestively as we entered his house.

When the interview was over, we went out into the darkness to take a photo. Thunder could be heard, and Gil looked up into the clouds, hopefully. We all smelled the stirred-up dust. Then it rained.

I’m the family historian. Whenever an aunt or uncle dies, the trunks all come to my house. I’m actually fourth generation. The whole thing was started by that gentleman right up there {points to a photograph}, Sam Garland. He was a slave in Mississippi, he was half black; his mother was a Cherokee Indian. They were gonna make a field hand out of him, so he ran off at the age of 14. Worked on the Mississippi River as a cabin boy, and he eventually heard that Congress was forming the 24th and 25th Infantry in the 9th and 10th Calvary for black soldiers to serve.

Gil is one of few remaining farmers in the area, working about 2,700 acres of wheat, corn, and sorghum. He is a founding member of the Kansas Black Farmers Association, and with that group is working on several projects. He feels that they need to create a niche for themselves, as commodity prices and operation costs have not been friendly recently. Some years ago, the railroad pulled out of town, making it harder and more expensive for Gil and his neighbors to offload their crops.

He is at times solemn and at times jolly as we talk, alternating between discussion of hardships and pleasures. Like many farmers, he left the farm when he had the chance, and never intended to come back, but ended up in charge when he returned one season.

I’m a flatlander. I like looking out my window and seeing the town 30 miles away. While my dad was alive, we ran cattle and I worked at Winter Park Ski Resort during the winter. I would leave Thanksgiving weekend, and dad could handle cattle by himself, and then about the second weekend of April I’d come back to the farm to work. Guys out there thought I was nuts, arguably the most beautiful scenery in the world, right? The Rocky Mountains. And after about 2 months, man, I was going nuts, I was like, “I need to see what’s over there!” I just couldn’t see far enough.

We asked about the KBFA and the associated projects, such as the Flour Co-op (he sent us off with a package of pancake mix, made from his white wheat flour and sewn up in a lovely little bag) and the Nicodemus Teff project, which hopes to grow and market teff to the American Ethiopian communities who can not import it from their home country.

[The KBFA] came together through Glickman vs. Pigford. Remember the lawsuit? Gosh, my timeline’s probably way off here, probably even 10 years ago. Tim Pigford files a lawsuit against the USDA for discrimination. It just went nationwide immediately. In fact, there’s still some issues with it. And because of that, we started going to different meetings to learn about the lawsuit.   I never will forget, we went to a meeting in Oklahoma City and I walked into a pretty good sized room, and there were probably 300-400 people there who were black farmers. Which just blew my mind. I had never really talked agriculture with another black person before, it was just strange. A lot of them were ranchers, still involved in agriculture.

Click the link to read the full interview. Gil speaks about no-till farming, his wariness of the direction that his type of agriculture is going, and about why he feels so connected to this spot.

When we asked him, as we asked everybody, what the role of the farmer is society should be, he had one of my favorite answers:

We should be kings. Seriously, we feed y’all!

GIL ALEXANDER

I’m the family historian. Whenever an aunt or uncle dies, the trunks all come to my house. I’m actually fourth generation. The whole thing was started by that gentleman right up there {points to a photograph}, Sam Garland. He was a slave in Mississippi, he was half black; his mother was a Cherokee Indian. He always worked with the livestock, worked with the horses. And he got in trouble one day with the master’s son, or something happened. Anyway, they were gonna make a field hand out of him, so he ran off at the age of 14. Worked on the Mississippi River as a cabin boy, and he eventually heard that Congress was forming the 24th and 25th Infantry in the 9th and 10th Calvary for black soldiers to serve.

So he joined up with the 10th cavalry at Fort Leavenworth in 1867. And because of his heritage, he served as a scout for the 10th cavalry company F; he could mingle with hostiles, get all their secrets, all that stuff. So when he started at Fort Hayes, Fort Wallace, Fort Sherman, a lot of the forts out in this area, he did his five years, and when he got out in 1872, decided that he wanted to settle down back out here. So he came back out, homesteaded some land; he was into everything, he was a politician, he had several implement dealerships in Nicodemus in his heyday, he actually led a group of other black settlers out to Manzanola, Colorado where there’s another black settlement.

Anyway, that’s how my family got here. And like I say, he’s my great-grandfather, so I’m 4th generation of doing this. I guess that’s probably why I do it. Like I said, I have my days and I’m going through one of my periods here, trying to make the books balance and figure out “okay, we’ve got the wheat cut, here’s what we’ve got to sell, how are we going to make this work for the next year?” It really gets frustrating right at this time of year.

You know, there’s too much history and too much hard work for me to just walk away from it, so I guess… You know, I was just visiting with some of my friends, relatives who come back for the celebration, who are computer programmers and they’re making big bucks. And I think “gosh…”. Every now and then I think about that. But I can leave my doors unlocked at night, so I guess that’s the bonus of it.

Are you the only one in your family who farms?

Right now, yes. I don’t have any children. I’m separated right now. I have a couple of nephews. Neither one of them seem to have the aptitude for it. So what I am thinking right now is more of an educational type…I’ve kind of been working with some friends of mine at K State with the minority agriculture program there, to be able to provide a place for minority kids who want to farm to come get a hands on type of thing.

Right now I’m just trying to pay off…I inherited a heck of a lot of debt from my parents, so I’m trying to get that paid off and make the thing work right now, to just stay here. That’s kind of top priority right now.

How much acreage are you farming now?

My sister and I, we own 1200 acres together. I’m farming right at 2700 right now with what I rent.

So how has farming…I mean, you’ve been doing this your whole life, right?

Basically. I grew up on it. With it. Hated it. Graduated from high school, left, never coming back. Got my degree in accounting in college, worked outside the farm for awhile, and came home to help with harvest one summer and never left. My stuff’s still in the basement, packed, marked “kitchen”, “living room”. {laughs}

I still don’t know what happened, I really don’t.

How has farming on this land changed for you over those years?

Oh…a lot has changed and a lot has not. ‘Course we’re doing more and more no-till, trying to learn to farm in the Great American Desert. Actually, the last two or three years it was kind of cool because we went to a wet cycle. Gosh, you can grow all kinds of things when it rains. Out here we’re semi-arid, so it was just kind of a bonus to have water standing. Right now we’re going back into that dry cycle.

But basically, the equipment, of course, is getting bigger, more expensive.   But I think that no-till and more of the chemical farming is the biggest change that I can see. And I’m still not quite…financially, or economically it hasn’t quite penciled out for me yet to go completely no-till. I would have sprayers I’d have to hire, all that type of thing. But for the moisture conservation part of it, really it makes a difference.   I think that’s one of the biggest changes.

And a lot of that scares me too because of all the chemicals we are using; we’re starting to see this Roundup-Ready corn, Roundup-Ready milo, stuff like that, and now we’ve got weeds that we can’t kill with it. That’s your go-to chemical for getting rid of stuff. I don’t know, but that’s one of the biggest changes I can see.

What are the biggest issues you’re dealing with now, and what has come up over the years?

The biggest issue, I think…oh gosh, there’s so many…but the commodity markets are just insane. Edgar {Hicks} was a commodity broker by trade and guys like him are sitting around scratching their head, like they don’t know what’s going on. I was out on the combine, we were actually out cutting wheat, and we get $4 here first part of July, and I picked up my cell phone and sold all I had cut, I think for like $4.14. Harvest was over, it kind of fluctuated, went up and down, went up, I sold a bunch more for $4.55, and last Friday it closed at $5.15. And no one knows…what’s driving this market? You get like 18 different answers, nobody knows. There’s no set…you know, you can’t sit down and study and try to make an educated decision on what to do. I mean there’s no patterns to follow or anything, it’s just nuts. So you just king of get your chicken bones and go from there!

I’m not as familiar with the wheat market as some of the other commodities; are you able to harvest and hold it in your bins for a fair amount of time, wait for the market…

Yeah, I do have…I’m sitting on about 10,000 out in the bins right now. Yeah, if you’re able. My big thing is, I got this debt I’m servicing. My equipment is old, getting older. I’ve got a combine out there, I bought it used, I believe it’s a ’98 or ’99, with beaucoup hours on it; my tractors got like almost 8,000 hours on it. And you know, there’s no way I can pencil out going out and buying new equipment, it just doesn’t work. I just gotta make…

That’s another thing that just blows my mind. When I was in high school, of course I wanted nothing to do with the farm. So any industrial arts or anything like that, you know, I wasn’t going to need that, so here I am at the tender age of 50, teaching myself to weld. But getting her done! Yeah. Machinery prices are just…you know…off the charts. And I don’t want to work hard enough to buy a new tractor, you know what I mean?   I have a friend of mine, who plants my fall crops for me. He bought a 16-year-old planter, I believe it is, John Deer, really nice, a nice Caterpillar tractor he pulls it with, and during planting season he runs that thing 24 hours a day, planting for everybody, just to make payments on the thing. I mean, I’m not afraid of hard work, but hey, I just don’t want to work that hard.

And land out here, it’s just gone nuts. That’s out of our hands because we’ve got a lot of…are you familiar with the CRP program? A lot of that is coming out this year. In fact they just had a new signup on a 15 year plan that I need to go and check on, but we have a lot og out-of-towners, hunters, who are buying up tracts of CRP for hunting, and you get 3 or 4 guys go together, they can afford to pay 12, 13, 14, 15 hundred dollars an acre for something that we would pay 6 or 700 an acre for. Now we can’t compete with that. We’re trying to make a living off of it, and they want to come out and play. Which, you know, that’s all part of the economy too, we welcome hunters and all of that, but we can’t compete with them driving the land prices up.

Are you renting land from those kind for folks or are they just keeping it for their own use?

They’re keeping it for their own use. Very little of it is farmed. They want to keep it as wild and as animal-friendly as possible, bird-friendly.   And a guy like me or the neighbors, we just can’t compete with that type of buying power.

So what would be some changes you would like to see in the larger ag system?

Oh gosh. You know, I don’t really think about that much.   I’d like to see equipment prices come down, I’d like to see the commodity prices at least stay in sync with fuel prices and food prices and everyday living expenses. Less government in it.   You know, the United States gets mad at Cuba and they put an embargo on wheat. What kind of sense does that make?

I don’t mind paying a fair price for something if it’s fair, and I like to get a fair price for my work, to put it simply. Right now it’s not even close. At my age…and this is my life, I poured everything into this, and I can’t just not do it. I can’t afford to retire. I’m buying lottery tickets once a week but so far…{chuckles}. I get up and go to work in the morning.

But I don’t mean for it to all be negative. It’s a good life. It’s hard work. I’m a country boy, I found out, after being away from the farm for awhile. I love it here. I’m a flatlander. I like looking out my window and seeing the town 30 miles away.

While my dad was alive, we ran cattle and I worked at Winter Park Ski Resort during the winter. I would leave Thanksgiving weekend, and dad could handle cattle by himself, and then about the second weekend of April I’d come back to the farm to work. Guys out there thought I was nuts, arguably the most beautiful scenery in the world, right? The Rocky Mountains. And after about 2 months, man, I was going nuts, I was like, “I need to see what’s over there!” I just couldn’t see far enough.

Yeah, this is home, so…I’m gonna be here until says different, I guess.

What do you imagine the future of this being? If you don’t have anybody in line to take it over…

I have some really good neighbors of mine who are like family, who I would make sure got it. They just live a mile east of us, a white family. We grew up a mile apart. His youngest son is farming. He’s actually a graduate from K-State in agricultural something or other. You know, if my plan for an educational or a school farm falls through I’m going to make sure that they got it. I would like for the ownership to stay in the family, or at least part of it, but make sure that they farmed it.

But I don’t know. You’re just seeing bigger and bigger operators, buying more and more land and getting bigger and bigger. A friend of mine lives right outside of Norton, he farms in 5 different counties. And it’s just insane, trying to move equipment, and he actually has to buy equipment to leave in this county because it’s too expensive to road it over…and it’s just…you know, they just keep getting bigger and it looks like to me like it’s, I don’t know, almost an organism that’s alive. I just don’t want any part of that. I’m blessed right now, my furthest field that I farm’s 7 miles over in that direction. I’ve been known to walk or ride my bike back and forth if I want.

And that’s scary too, the family farm…you know, that’s one of the neat things about harvest, is…and my sister, she’s kind of a forward-thinking old gal, but my neighbors over here, the ones I grew up with, a lot of times we harvest together, we kind of pool our equipment, we pool our trucks, and pool our labor together. Cathy – that’s Bob’s wife – she does dinnertime like you would not believe in the harvest field. I mean, she brings it out, mashed potatoes and gravy and thermoses, all spread out, and everybody stops and eats on the tailgate and all that. To me, that’s just living. I just live for that. Sharon, you know, she might drop by, throw a sandwich at you if you’re lucky, but…

But that type of thing, I don’t see it…you know, I think it’s gonna be a thing of the past.

The family farm?

Yeah. My grand-nieces and –nephews, my nephew’s kids, they live down near Ruidoso, New Mexico with their mom; I took them home, about three weeks ago I guess, and I was driving up through Clovis and Portales New Mexico, and some of the big dairies and the hog farms and…I just look at that and it just…I don’t know, it’s scary. But you’re seeing more and more of it. Such is the world is going to, bigger is better, I guess.

Have you always felt pretty supported by your community around here?

Oh yeah. Yeah. And that’s not always a good thing {laughs}. I’d have probably been out of here it wasn’t for... {laughs} Yeah, oh yeah, big support. And the fact that, not only are small farmers a dying breed, but a small black farmer is even rarer. So, got that pressure too, jeeze!

But as far as community support, yeah. A lot.   Harvest time, people are like, “if you need a truck driver just holler, anything you need!” Yeah.   Get a lot of that.

What’s your role with the organization…

Kansas Black Farmers Association?

Yeah. How does that…

Actually, that started…we came together through Glickman vs. Pigford. Remember the lawsuit? Gosh, my timeline’s probably way off here, probably even 10 years ago. Tim Pigford out of Louisiana…somewhere down south…files a lawsuit against the USDA for discrimination. It just went nationwide immediately. In fact, there’s still some issues with it. And because of that, we started going to different meetings to learn about the lawsuit.   I never will forget, we went to a meeting in Oklahoma City and I walked into a pretty good sized room, and there were probably 300-400 people there who were black farmers. Which just blew my mind. I had never really talked agriculture with another black person before, it was just strange. A lot of them were ranchers, still involved in agriculture.

So anyway, that’s kind of how we got together. After the lawsuit kind of died down, there was a few farmers in Eastern Kansas…we call ourselves the Kansas Black Farmers Association, but basically it’s the few, 2, 3, 4 of us that are out here. Out of the KBFA we formed the Nicodemus Flour Co-op, which will be running our flour mill and responsible for the pancake mix.

We have RC&D {Resource Conservation and Development}, which has been a big help, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that program?

And we read about the teff project…

Right, right. In fact we have a teff field day coming up here, you guys should stay for that. Oh, remind me to talk about teff too.

They {RC&D} have been a big help with the logistics of putting everything together, helping us with grant writing. We just finished a 5 year plan which drove me nuts. My cousin, Gary, he farms right west of Nicodemus, he’s even worse that I am, just hates going to meetings. But I’m the guy who sits out on the tractor, I’m not the one setting here trying to hammer out a 5 year plan. Well anyway, we got through it. And one of the things in our 5 year plan, what we hope to be able to do…

We’ve got descendants all over the world, especially all over the United States, who have their roots, have their ties in Nicodemus. And a lot of those people are well off, I mean they’ve done well for themselves. So one of the things we want to do is to create a database so when there’s land for sale in the area we can let our people know about it. So they can buy a piece of Nicodemus township, get back home.

There was a house that came for sale just right on the highway west of Nicodemus not too far from here, not long ago, a really nice house. The guy that built it decided to move to the Ozarks. And when they advertised the house, it was on television and the newspaper and the sale bills… “So many miles from Hill City, so many miles from Bogue…” Nicodemus was never even mentioned. I mean, it’s in Nicodemus township, right?   And it just dawned on us that if one of our descendants would have known about it…and in fact there’s several of them like, “Man, wish we’d have known that was for sale, we’d have bought it.” I don’t mean to sound prejudicial or anything, but white people just don’t realize that black people do have means to buy land and want to buy land, and want to get back to home, so to speak.

So that’s one of the things we hope to do with the KBFA is be able to have that database where we can connect buyers with sellers if necessary as well as help each other with machinery pools, just help each other survive out here.

My focus really is on the white wheat project, that’s been a dream of mine for a long time to be able to mill our own white wheat flour. In fact, this year, this fall, I plan to plant white wheat and hopefully things will roll along, where in the next couple of years we’ll be…we have a small mill now, call it a hobby mill, where we can do just little small batches.

What kind of wheat are you growing at the moment?

Hard winter red. And that requires, ah, you’re a baker so you know what has to come out of the red wheat, the endosperm, separating, all that, to make it millable. But we found that white wheat you can get away with grinding everything, so…

So do you see a lot of younger folks interested in farming around the area? I mean, you’re talking about the program at the University, is it…

Not in the area, but they are out there. And I don’t know whether the availability or the opportunity is a problem, or if it’s interest. I can’t answer that. And that’s white or black, I don’t know.   None of my classmates or anything like that…everybody booked, even the kids who were farm. They all left. There’s a couple of younger guys, maybe 3 or 4 years behind me in school that stayed around the farm. And I find that they’re just gong nuts, getting bigger and bigger, driving themselves… One guy I saw the other day and he looked 10 years older than I am.

If you’re not grown into it or if you don’t have a family member that has land, as far as saying “I want to go farm,” you know, there are programs that are geared for beginning farmers, but man…starting out. That would be…I would say, “run”. I really would. Takes some serious money, some serious banking. And everything, a lot of things, would have to go right to get up and running.

Are there programs out there for minorities to encourage…

Yeah, there are. But…I’ve learned more about it just since the lawsuit with the USDA. Growing up out here you grow colorblind, you just go work. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day that had to remind me, he says, “Don’t you think that was discrimination?” I don’t even remember what happened now, but I’m like, “Well, you know, maybe it was.” I just don’t…I don’t deal like that.

But yeah, there are programs available but I’ve never taken advantage of any of them. And now that I’m an established farmer, I don’t know what would be out there. Supposedly after the lawsuit, minorities, or socially disadvantaged I think is the word they use now, are supposed to have top priority as far as loans and things like that. I’ve dealt with FHA loans before, and I just hope I never have to get back involved with another one.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but there’s so, so, so much bookkeeping involved nowadays. And me being alone here right now I have to do it all, I have to do the action on the tractor and some nights come in and get it all on paper. Which isn’t bad, a lot of it’s on computer. I do all my accounting on computer, which is really a blessing at tax time. Press a button and just take it up there.

Do you think that…are policies discriminatory? Or have they been?

{pauses} Mm-hm.

Do you think they are still?

Mm-hm. You’re gonna ask me why.

I’d love to know, yeah.

{pauses} Maybe not discriminatory in the sense of race. Discriminatory in the sense of, if you don’t already have it, you can’t get it. Does that make sense? And out here it’s so different than in Mississippi, too. I have visited with some of those guys down there and it just…you know, what’s subtle out here is so blatant down there. Those guys are really…it’s really been rough.

I’m on the county FSA {Farm Service Agency} committee here, have served off and on the last 12 years. My dad served on it back in the, oh, probably late ‘60’s. So my family’s always been involved in the policy making, at least on a local level. So I’ve never really felt discrimination as being a part of it. But I know it was. But it’s just that we weren’t geared that way to think about it. The way the policies are written, you almost have to already be a successful farmer in order to succeed. I know that sounds crazy.

They say, “yeah, we can give you a low-interest loan,” but they tie your hands. Let’s say I start a small cattle herd. And they tie your hands to where you can’t get the things you need to help the herd grow or…I don’t know, it’s hard for me to explain it. But yeah, it’s there for sure.

Now what’s the goal of the teff project going on here?

Teff. Teff is Edgar {Hicks}’s brainchild. We were trying to find an alternative crop, trying to fill that niche market. We started out as teff-for-grain. Teff is actually the smallest seed grain known to man. {goes and gets a bag to show us} Some of the attributes when it’s ground into flour are similar to wheat flour.

Our experimentation was that out here, however, it’s really catching on for a forage crop. Guys are nuts about it for their horses. I’m told that in England, or in Europe somewhere, some thoroughbreds eat nothing but teff, it’s their exclusive diet. A lot of guys like it here for weaning calves. And so we’re having our field day on Thursday, for forage teff.

We’re having a hard time harvesting the stuff, a seed that small.

Falls right through the combine doesn’t it?

Well yeah, a lot of duct tape involved. There’s a guy in Oklahoma who farms a considerable amount of acreage of it, who does harvest with a combine. He windrows it first, and manages to thresh it. We bought what was called a Flail-Vac, which is basically a machine with a brush on it. Didn’t have a lot of success with it.

But it’s an Ethiopian staple, they make the bread called injera. Ethiopia banned exportation of teff to the United States. So the Ethiopian community here in the United States can’t get it, so they’re willing to pay almost anybody anything to get the grain or to get the flour. We get calls from all over, “can you send us a truckload?”

How close is the nearest Ethiopian community?

There’s a community in Wichita actually. Edgar {Hicks} was working with a lady in Minneapolis I believe, and she bought a lot of our first crop that we were able to harvest and actually get the seed off of. But it was very labor intensive. We almost had to do it like they do in Ethiopia, to throw it up in the air, let the wind…I mean, it’s just hard to deal with, a seed that small.

But anyway, that’s something else we’re kind of messing with through the KBFA with RC&D’s help. And things like that are kind of cool. It breaks the monotony of what you do every day when you can kind of play around with something like that.

I imagine most everyone around here is doing the corn, wheat, soy rotation, yeah?

Yeah, corn, wheat, sorghum. See soybeans every now and then. You’ll be going out toward irrigation country, you’ll start to see a lot more corn. Right here in our area we’re mainly dryland, so sorghum, corn, and wheat, that’s about it. Every now and then some sunflowers.

What do you think that the role of the farmer should be in this society?

We should be kings. Seriously, we feed y’all! You guys aren’t farmers are you?

Grew up on one.

Okay, well, we feed you.

Thank you!

{laughs} You know, in a way we’re cutting our own throat in that sense that we’ve learned to grow more on less. I sometimes wonder what’s going to happen down the road. When I was speaking earlier about the no-till and all the chemicals and all the fertilizers we’re using running down into our streams and waters, you know, that’s another lifetime before we know the whole full impact of what we’re doing.

But as far as the role of the farmer…farming…farming’s been forever, I mean hunters and gatherers…and then you learn to farm. It’s the backbone, it’s what supports, makes the whole thing go around. I know people, especially urban folks, don’t see it that way.

Back in the ‘70’s, the tractor parade to Washington and all of that…Farmers are such an independent lot, to get two to think alike is just impossible, but to get a strike of some sort, “okay, let’s just feed ourselves and forget about the world for awhile and see what happens, how quickly we can bring them to their knees”…you know, thinking diabolically here, but it could happen. If we quit growing the food, raising the beef, the pork, the chickens. I know there’s a lot of people out there who eat tofu and cous cous and whatnot, but there’s a heck of a lot of them that eat meat and potatoes too.

But it seems that it’s the other way around, that we get the short end of the stick most of the time for whatever reason. I’m not saying that for sympathy, that’s just the way it is.

How do you think farmers could gain appreciation from non-farmers?

How we can gain appreciation from them? Wow, never even thought of that before.

I mean, just about everybody would say that there’s a disconnect between people and their food…

I feel sorry for most urban people. I mean, they’re so far…I mean, farming’s not only the growing of the food, it’s the whole cycle of life. The chicken and the egg and the calf being born, and nursing and growing to be beef, the seed being planted, watching it grow and mature into…I mean, it’s the way everything works, and most urban people are so far removed from that that they’re just clueless. Thinking chocolate milk comes from brown cows and stuff like that, it’s like…it’s…I feel sorry for them really.

I would think it would be good for them to know at least some of what goes into what they eat, how it gets to their table. You know, Discovery channel every now and then, they do a good job when they do a show on the combine and the wheat and how it’s harvested and all that, might give them a clue. You know…I think they’re just basically clueless. Ignorant to the whole…and there’s so much more to it than just farming, like I say, it’s just a way of life.

I think urban kids especially could learn so much if they could get that root or that underlying understanding of how life begins and ends, how you can apply it maybe.

We have some practical questions. When we were in Pennsylvania we met folks doing organic no-till. Is anybody doing that around here?

My cousin is experimenting a little bit on a very small scale. The leach out time to get to organic is something like 7 years, isn’t it?

You mean to be certified?

Right.

I mean, even if not certified, just the practice of it…

Right, right, and I mean, organic produce man, it sells for…it’s valuable. There’s another niche market. For me it would be just the gearing up, getting to…I mean, I got out of the cattle business about 7 years ago. I was buying feed for them, and it just wasn’t penciling out so I sold my herd and rented out my pasture. Not having the organic fertilizer, so to speak {the manure} to use…I can’t imagine farming without fertilizer.

I can remember as a kid when we first started using anhydrous ammonia. I remember our neighbor over to the east on a field right next to us. We planted without it and he used it, and dad was just like, “woww.” From then on we’ve always used some type of fertilizer.

I want to be a good farmer, but I also want to be a good steward too, I don’t want to abuse the soil or when I leave here leave it to a point where no one can do anything with it, like a barren…but I’ve got a banker I’ve got to satisfy too, so I’ve got to grow those bushels. So I can’t imagine farming without fertilizer.

{thunder is heard overhead} Oh, that sounds good.

It’s that drive and that pressure to produce to produce more bushels on less acres, you know. Unless a guy came out here that was independently wealthy and didn’t have a banker to make happy.

Where does most of the wheat go from here? Does a lot of it end up being export?

Oh yeah. And that’s another thing that really killed us commodity-wise. They took our railroads out. So, everything has to go by truck. The main railhead now is the line that runs through Hayes, basically follows I-70. From there it makes its way down to the gulf. And export to wherever, I guess. They claim there are stockpiles of wheat everywhere right now, but I don’t know where it is or what they’re doing with it. It’s odd when there’s so much hunger in the world. They’ll send over 2 or 3 billion dollars, well why not send over some wheat? Whatever. I don’t make those decisions.

Sisters, Oregon: Lynn Miller, editor, The Small Farmer's Journal

2011-03-06T08:47:00.006-05:00

I'm working on an editorial right now, I just came up with something.
Sometimes you just put two words together and you think, well why didn't
I ever think of that before? I'm trying to understand what this means.
It could be good, it could be bad, but it's bouncing around in my head.
And the two words are "civilian agriculture."

Because what we have had is a military agriculture...not militant, but this
institutionalized, industrialized agriculture has lost its...its
civility, certainly, but it's also lost its civilian aspects. And I
figured, if I'm permitted to stay at this for another 10 or 20 years,
I'll get something right.

In the spirit of Spring we thought we would skip around a little, and share our interview with Lynn Miller of The Small Farmer's Journal based in the idyllic town of Sisters, Oregon. Before I write about Lynn I will set the personal scene. Travis and I met while we were both living in the slightly bigger town to the southwest, Bend, Oregon. Sisters is named after a set of three mountains that tower gracefully in the background, known simply to most as the Three Sisters, or Faith, Hope, and Charity to the more detail-oriented. They stand over the town like good reminders and the folks who live there do seem to have the extraordinary community that can accompany a small mountain town, where the owners of the cafes are also the waitresses and they know all the locals' names. Everyone gathers at the unabashedly Christian-themed coffee house for good coffee, conversation with friends, and a game of checkers on the huge checkerboard, or a rock in the rustic rocking chairs.

Besides being an extremely pleasant town, Sisters is home to the Sisters Folk Festival and a world famous quilt show each year, which makes its population bulge with tourists in the summer. Trav and I timed our arrival to coincide with the Festival, which is my favorite music festival to be at- there are about 6 stages set up throughout the downtown area and talented musicians play all day and into the night for a weekend, with enough variety to satisfy every ear. We both have friends that are like family to us in Bend, so finishing our trip here was like a big homecoming for Trav and I. I spent that week with 4 girls I had lived with and we share a connection that expands when one of us goes and snaps back like a rubber band when we are all together. It was a week of beautiful weather and friends and music and wrapping up an epic journey across the country.

Back to Lynn Miller of the quarterly publication, The Small Farmers Journal (SFJ). Lynn has his office in Sisters; it is a two story building filled with all kinds of things that could start a thousand conversations. There are racks that hold past and present issues of the SFJ, farming implements, Lynn's own paintings all over the walls, and his office is piled high with papers and books which over the course of the interview he often refers to. Lynn himself is a distinguished-looking man with a white goatee and a cowboy hat. His bearing and speech are undeniably intelligent and passionate in a dramatic sort of way, a product of a life of "more keynotes and presentations than I care to count."

Lynn started the interview off by telling us who his enemies are and why he considers them threats. The folks who have brought much popular attention to small-scale and organic agriculture, like the producers of Food Inc. or Michael Pollan, outrage Lynn because he believes that they are creating a fad that will pass away sooner rather than later. Boutique agriculture is my enemy.

The public eye is on agriculture in a way that it hasn't been before as most people are far removed from the farm but the public is getting more and more concerned about food supply, cost, and manner of production. But he sees a great and inspiring movement amongst people of all ages, a new agrarian momentum.

Those 20-something people that you're talking about, that we're talking
with and to and about all the time, they're about the craft of farming.
Not the industry. The craft. That's what they're drawn to. And
they're drawn to those models, examples, where the craft of the farming
will pay the bills for them, give them the character of a life, a
working life, that they feel genetically drawn to. It's like a
genetic memory.

Lynn feels that popular agricultural celebrities, like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, are making capital off of the attention ag is getting without making a substantial difference in the way that people see farmers and farming. Basically, Lynn thinks that anyone who trivializes agriculture is in danger of having the masses lose interest in the "fad" of agriculture that exists right now. Lynn proposes a much more rigorous (and truthful) education for non farming folks, so that they can know that agriculture isn't a trivial matter; survival is what it comes down to.

Lynn gave us some personal history (My mother is Puerto Rican. English is my second language. I grew up in the barrio. I have degrees in the fine arts. I was a professional musician and singer. I was a ballet dancer. I was an actor...) and about how he started the SFJ about 35 years ago. He had experience managing different farm operations, and bought his first farm and team of horses when he was in his late twenties. Farming without tractors was rare and Lynn found that lots of people wanted to know where to get old equipment for horse teams, as well as how to use it. Lynn and his father brainstormed creating a quarterly magazine chock full of information applicable to small scale sustainable farming. The SFJ has an ever increasing following, and with the rising prices of fuel and interest in alternative energy it is sure to keep growing.

Lynn, a regular speech-giver, was one of the most poised and articulate interviewees we encountered. Read on for the full interview, including insight into agricultural movements, pig roasts, and some poetic views on how we all connect to farming...

LYNN MILLER, FULL INTERVIEW:
At the risk of heading this discussion where you didn't want it to go,
because you did give me an outline in your email, and maybe to save you
some time, I'll give you a couple of ingredients that fit into what
you're talking about. First, to ask you, do you know who Eric Schlosser
is?

Yes.

Do you know who Michael Pollan is?

Yes.

They are my enemies. They are the enemy of the small farm. A lot of
people would say, "What? But they're bringing the public attention to
boutique agriculture." Boutique agriculture is my enemy. It doesn't
matter who my enemies are except in the context of as we talk...do you
know who Gary Nabham is?

Hm mm.

He's the man who Michael Pollan has plagiarized for the last ten years.
He's a brilliant Arab American living in the Southwest who is our
premier food ethnologist. He's been studying where food has come from.
He has...I'm gonna show you a copy of one of his books right here {gets
up to find a book}...a gift he gave me, we were both keynote speakers at
the organic farming conference in...pardon my mess here...Gary, where
are you! This is the curse of having so many interesting things to look
at...{continues sifting through things}...Gary's the one who was
credited with this concept that he doesn't want to take any credit for,
of locavores. Did I loan that out? Oh here it is. One of many books.
If you can look him up, and I think you're going to find a treasure
trove...so, there are two things that we started to talk about that
contextually are very important to the work that we're doing today.

One is this notion of wherever we have an opportunity to try to correct
what is rapidly becoming the fashion of the day and the lingo around
food. Short pieces in Newsweek in the current edition are talking about
how the new heroes are farmers, is an insidious little piece of
journalism because it's written from the perspective of someone who last
week must have been writing about shoes, and doesn't understand some of
the practical realities of things that I'm sure that you're keen to
understand, and probably already have a good grasp of.

So, it's important for us, wherever we have a chance, not to let it
slide.

"Us" who?

{pauses} I'm one of the founders of the Small Farms Conservancy, which
is a non-profit. I'm the founder of this publication. And forgive me
when I will reference "we" or "us" in a way that is a little bit
oblique. We just take ourselves maybe too seriously as a champion of
the disenfranchised when it comes to agriculture. By the
disenfranchised I might mean somebody who's having a hard time paying
the bills and has a small meatcutting plant in Prineville. Or it might
be a dairy farmer that's struggling, as I'm going to speak about in a
minute, in an Amish community in Ohio. Or it might be a 20-something
person who really wants a chance at farming, but at every turn can't
seem to break into it. So it's a little bit nebulous. But maybe those
examples give you a sense of it. Along with that is a vast group of
people who have been working for upwards of four decades now on
so-called alternative agriculture issues. Everything from seed saving
to farmland preservation to justice for migrant workers...all sorts of
overlapping domains that fit in here.

So, right now it's fashionable. But 1973, when Eliot Coleman and I
first got together in Nebraska, it was weird. It was...why would
anybody question corn, soybeans, and wheat? Why would anybody even
suggest that you could feed the world with organic production. It was
unthinkable then, except to a handful of people. And now it's a
fashionable situation, and I'm concerned that that fashion is going to
make it transitory. So wherever it's possible to shoot a gun at the
whole issue of fad, when it applies to this, I want to do that. I'm not
trying to knock down what you're doing or some of the things that maybe
you need to be concerned about in your project, but for us it's
important, I believe, that we not let it slide.

For example, you were talking about the Amish dairy farmer. One of our
subscribers some 30-odd years ago was a small dairy, horse-powered, in
Wisconsin, his name was George Siemon. He's the CEO of Organic Valley,
the dairy co-op in Wisconsin. On the surface, Michael Pollan will tell
you here's an example of how we're gonna correct agriculture. Let me
give you just a very short, brief anecdote of what's happened here.
Organic Valley...which credits at its core that it formed its marketing
co-op on the precepts that I had written about in the Journal...had
become part of the problem. What they did was they went into the Amish
communities aggressively, as recently as two years ago and back before
that...they went to the Amish and they said, "We need your milk. We're
willing to pay you a premium. We'll come and get it." These are dairy
farms with an average size of 11 cows. Many of which had no modern
technology. They had been hand milking using cream cans, using tanks
filled with springwater to cool their milk, and having a long history of
supplying that milk and cream to local creameries, local cheese
factories, in a patchwork quilt all along, say, the Wayne Homes and
Tuscarora region of Ohio, where the cheese factories were withing 5 to
15 miles of one another. And they were everywhere.

Organic Valley went in aggressively, won the attention of some of the
deacons of the church communities and said, "We're gonna pay you a
premium, we'll get you on contract, we'll come pick up your milk."
Sounded like a good deal. So many, a very significant percentage of
those Amish dairies, signed on with Organic Valley. What happened is
that then the co-op went back to them after a year, year and a half, two
years, after the cheese factories closed because they didn't have
sufficient product to continue business...Organic Valley went back to
them and said, "We're dealing with some economic realities. And in
order for us to justify picking up milk from you, you have to have twice
as many pounds. So now you need to have at least 30 cows. Then it went
to 40. Then it went to 50. Then it went to 80. And that was a total
breakdown in the cultural fabric for these families and their dairies;
they couldn't do it. Some have been successful, but most have been
unsuccessful, and we now have this problem where they can't restart
those creameries.

When I confronted George with this in telephone conversation, some seven
months ago, he said, "Lynn you might be one of my heroes, but you're
delusional. Because we can't feed the world with small farms. We have
to get real here. We can't afford to send a semi truck 500 miles to
pick up the milk production of a handful of dairy farms that have only
11 cows." And I said, "Then why did you sign them up? Why didn't you
see what you were doing to the fabric of that culture potentially?" We
agreed to disagree. He feels that the best model for organic
agriculture is a production scale model. And production scale is a
euphemism for industrialized scale. And its also a euphemism for a
given vertical integration, which requires a production-credit
relationship between the farmer and, in this case, the marketing co-op,
or whatever the case may be.

So they're our enemy. But you see in the media now, if it's organic milk
it's got to be part of the wining equation. So it's not that simple.
In the media Eric Schlosser and Food Inc. and Michael Pollan have got to
be part of the winning equation. But they're not. They're the enemy
because they're pointing us in a direction of a false inevitability. It
is not inevitable that our agriculture has to be an industrial equation.

Those 20-something people that you're talking about, that we're talking
with and to and about all the time, they're about the craft of farming.
Not the industry. The craft. That's what they're drawn to. And
they're drawn to those models, examples, where the craft of the farming
will pay the bills for them, give them the character of a life, a
working life, that they feel genetically drawn to. It's like a genetic
memory. For so many people that we talk to who are one, two, three
generations away from farming, the first time they smell the inside of a
chicken house it triggers something. Where have I smelled that before?
The first time they hear a cow calling for a calf that's wandered off,
it triggers something. It's a genetic memory in so many things, the
smell of the dirt, smell of a given season, what water smells like in
the summertime when it's on a dry crop. Those things are part of our
genetic memory, I believe that. People are drawn to that, and they're
drawn to this suspicion they think...but again, I think it's a deeper
ingrained intuition...that there's a working life here that they want
for themselves. I see it as a return. And the industrial equation and
this false inevitability doesn't give them that.

When somebody is 20-something years old and decides they want to be a
farmer, and I once was...when they go out into the wider world, for the
longest time, they were told "You gotta have a lot of money to be a
farmer, and you gotta get real about it. You're gonna need chemistry,
you're gonna need heavy metal technologies, you're gonna have to get
with the program or you're just not gonna make it."

Everything isn't changing. Everything changed. It already happened. We
are here right now at the end of industrial agriculture. It is dying on
the vine. It will not survive the next 20, 30 years. It will not.
It'll be gone. Hopefully I'll still be around to be at the party. But
it's a dead beast.

It's a dead beast because, in a broader sense, in the so-called
developed world, everybody worries about their food safety. They
don't know now whether they can trust it when they take it off the
shelf. For the longest time they didn't think about it! If you bought
a dozen eggs or a package of hamburger or some vegetables out of the
supermarket you didn't have to think about being sick. The federal
government does not want us to even begin to dwell on the fact that for
the last three consecutive years there have been over 70 million food
poisonings in this country alone. Every year for three years. This
year we're already past 75 million food-based poisonings. Most of
those fall under the category of the E.coli concerns and the situation
right now with salmonella in the eggs and hamburger and all the rest of
it. But the scale of that is staggering when you think about the
mindset people had when they were afraid about these new strains of flu
and potential harm from those new strains of flu... the scale pales by
comparison to what we have going on with industrial agriculture. What
it's giving us is a basic insecurity in our food products. Very few
people can trace the food, let alone adequately test it for whether or
not it's gonna make us sick. Where has it gone? All the way through
the process? Whether its Organic Valley or any of the conventional
dairy marketing units, they're putting their milk into bulk tanks and
it's coming from everywhere, into one bulk tank. It's impossible to
retrace those steps to identify exact which cow contaminated that
milk. And it doesn't take very much to contaminate 8,000 gallons of
milk and make a whole lot of people sick.

But I'm getting off on a tangent, just to tell you that, for me...I
said, pompously, that I know what's going to happen and that it isn't as
simple as it seems to try to understand what's positive and what's
negative on the landscape. We're working right now on some things that
we find tremendously exciting in terms of identified opportunities and
how to possibly address those. Those people that are getting started
with farming right now on a small, modest scale, independent operations,
they're having to revisit the same problem that we've had for decades,
and that is...what do you do with the lettuce or the lamb after you've
done a good job of growing? Right now the whole concept of community
supported agriculture or CSAs, marketing co-ops, is very popular, but it
isn't an answer to the wider scale of things.

The answer to the wider scale of things is to revisit, at an appropriate
scale, the middle man. What we need, for example, whether it's here in
Central Oregon or in Ohio, or where have you, a very specific example,
we need fully-licenced and certifiable mobile slaughtering facilities.
We need something that can go to a farm and process 50 ducks, 5 lambs, 2
pigs, 50 cattle, I mean not all in one swoop, but to be able to deal
with that at a custom level. Now the economics of it are fascinating,
because they all work when you stack them up, except at the outset, the
initial investment. The demand for the service on a continental basis
is there. If there was a mobile slaughtering unit here in Central
Oregon it would be busy every single day for 6 months out of the year.
And it could charge the going rates of a stationary facility, pay its
bills, pay a good wage, and pay for the equipment. If we had them, then
more people would be raising small quantities. If we had...just stay
with that example for just a second...right now I could place 500 mobile
slaughtering units in the continental US. It doesn't seem like a lot,
but those 500 mobile slaughtering units, withing 6 months to 12 months,
would create a demand for another 500. Just because people would say,
"Well I know now that I could raise 50 or 100 hens at a time and sell
those because I don't have to cut their heads off and clean them," if
that's the process. So you would invite new farmers who were thinking,
"Now I have a way to get my product someplace." And that in turn would
create a demand for an additional unit. And those additional units
would then create a demand, or feasibility for more of the small-farm
units.

The stock of the large multinational food concerns like Tyson Chicken,
and so forth, they're fragile right now because people who own the
stocks say "Wait a minute...if we're gonna recall a whole bunch of
stuff, maybe we should sell our stock and place the stock somewhere
else." In the agribusiness industry, there's only one sector that is
still realizing significant capitalization, and that's bioengineering.
Genetically modified organisms. For example, you've probably already
seen that information that the Gates Foundation had placed several
hundred million dollars into purchases of stock in Monsanto. That's
been in the last 2, 3 weeks. Because they see that genetically modified
seeds and organisms are the best way to feed third world countries. I
don't know how they're coming to that conclusion. But that money's
still being placed in that direction. But there are things that are
starting to happen already that are, well, how do I say this...Monsanto
and a few other multinational organizations placed a lot of money into
India and did a lot of field testing of...are you familiar with what
happened there? I don't have to tell you the story. But that's falling
apart. In a very big way. And now we're starting to see some
scientific evidence of the devastation that could be caused when we
aren't paying attention to how we break the chain in our biodiversity.

So it's gonna happen, and it's gonna happen relatively soon, maybe
within the next half-dozen years, that genetic engineering is gonna fall
to its own ax. But not before it has done a lot more damage.

Jumping back and forth, we already have, and you already know it, you're
part of it because you've come here to talk about these things, we are
right in the middle of a new agrarian revolution. It's here. Monsanto
is no longer the enemy; Monsanto is a dying dragon. It's gonna die on
its own. It's dying. Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, so
many of them, they will not be able to survive; they're dying on their
own. Our enemy is within our own ranks, like I said. Trivializing what
we're doing by making it fodder for a vogue magazine article; by
misappropriating some valuable information that are tools and putting
them through some kind of food mill to come out with anecdotes to sell
more books for Malcom Gladwell and Michael Pollan, it's not helping us.

Heirloom varieties are very important; biodiversity is incredibly
important. We have on our side the fact that we can, by using an
intelligent approach to organic-base agriculture, be growing soil at the
same time as we're producing food. We can increase our soil fertility.
There are still people within the land grant college system that see
that as impossible, that soil fertility is something...once you remove
it it cannot be replaces, that it's like a mining process. They either
see that as an inevitable and "so what?", or they see it as lamentable
and "we can't do anything about it." Both camps are wrong. Dead
wrong. We can grow soil. And we should be growing soil. As we're
producing food.

Alan Savory, who started something called holistic resource management,
a renegade agronomist from Africa, you familiar with him? Okay. Savory
has this perspective... we were at some meetings together in Nevada, and
talking about this idea that for grazing animals, the amount of pounds of
meat, if that's your objective or goal, that you produce should never be
a factor in your equation. You're growing soil. And you're trying to
produce calories with the least number of caloric input. The premise
being that if you ended up with more cattle, that basically was a waste
product that you could turn into some revenue. But that wasn't your
objective. I think that we should be looking at the food we produce off
of farms the same way. That our objective is not to feed people, our
objective is not to grow as many tons as possible of something that you
could take off the ground and take it someplace else, but our objective
is to grow the soil. And return it to its highest level of fertility.
If we do that, we end up with more waste product, in the form of
broccoli or what have you, than if our objective was to grow more
broccoli!

In the 40-some-odd years that I've been working on these issues, there's
never been a time when there was so many sensitive,intelligent, caring
people involved in these issues, and wanting to be involved in these
issues than there are right now. Never been this many. And there's
never been a time when the impediments to actually making it happen were
falling away like they are now. It used to be, as I said, the quotient
was that you had to have a pile of money to be farming. And now we're
finding out that that's not the case. There's some really tricky stuff
that still has to be played out, which has to do with our cultural ethic
toward land ownership.

I had a meeting in Maine about 11 months ago with two
incredibly...master farmers, absolute master farmers who had managed
farms for other people and now wanted farms of their own. And I had,
through the Conservancy, some farms that were available, that belonged
to the Conservancy, and could never belong to anyone else, basically in
the public trust as a nonprofit holding. And I offered to the two of
them that they could take over these farms, and farm them in the way
that they wanted to farm. We could work out all the details, and they
both said no. Organic farms, handed over for their stewardship. And
they said, "No. We want to own the farm so that the work we do is
building equity." Because we're still in this cultural notion that is,
in many respects bizarre, that what we're gonna do with our lives is end
up at some point with the biggest pile of whatever it was that we value,
that we can possibly create, on that day that we leave. And I guess we
give it to our family, or whatever the case may be, but that all happens
in those final moments. In this country we have this embarrassment of
riches that's created problems within our notions of property ownership.

In Europe I have a friend who's a retired high school ag teacher in
France. He lives...{pulls up a photo}...this is
his home in France. He's on a 300-acre farm that he rents in France for
the equivalent of $400 a month. He can never own it. It's so embroiled
in 400 years of ownership that all he can ever do is rent it. It's
inconceivable that he would ever own it. But it's his. He's protected
in the way that the government has structured its laws with regard to
protecting farming and the family's position there, so that in parts of
Switzerland and France and Germany and England, this whole issue of land
ownership...very different than what we have here. If somebody comes to
me now and says, "I want to farm, I need a piece of land," I can put
them on a farm. I can't give them the deed, but I can put them on a
farm. And now, for the first time, we have people who will listen to
that. Who will think about creative ways of how that might work for
them for the long term. That's staggering. The door's just barely
cracking open, but it's gonna change.

We have called for a whole new homestead act in this country. Just
yesterday we may have gotten an incredible alliance started toward this,
but the concept that we had before yesterday for this homestead act goes
to the fact that a huge percentage of this country is public lands.
What a lot of people don't realize is the extent to which that is land
that was transferred by foreclosure to the federal government during the
depression for lack of payment of taxes. Arable lands, we're not
talking about Yellowstone. We're not talking about some mining claim
someplace, or oil claim. We're talking about farmland that is vacant,
as part of the Bureau of Land Management's trust. What we're trying to
do is make a case that the federal government needs to make that land
available to people in a similar fashion to the old homestead act we
had. So we could repopulate. Because we contend that, globally, today,
and the number is going to be growing as we move forward, we need 50
million new farmers. 50 million farmers. And that number will expand
because agribusiness...you were talking about the consolidation towards
bigger farmers...that's actually stopped now. We're at the tail end of
that tide. It's just starting to come back the other way, where large
holdings can't cut it, whether it's corporately held or these are family
corporations, what have you, they aren't able to pay the bills. It's
gotten very complicated. It's not just as simple as the fact that they
don't make enough money to pay their bills...they're embroiled in all
kinds of complicated relationships with regard to how they get their
production credit, who owns shares in it, what relationships are...it's
falling apart. Those places are being vacated rapidly.

So we have a situation now where we are actually importing more food
into this country, from other countries...more food than we have in over
a hundred years. On a percentage basis. In terms of the sheer volume,
tonnage, it's more food than we've ever imported, it's staggering! If
those trends continue and we don't come up with a lot more farmers, and
a way to have that production localized and distributed locally, we're
headed for a real class warfare issue here, where poor people are not
gonna get food to eat, unless they take it. There are a lot of
sociologists working on those concerns, looking at that in the future,
I'm more concerned and more interested in all these opportunities we have,
and how to make that work than in the doomsday stuff.

As I go through my mental Rolodex with the things I started to tell you,
each and every one of them, realizing I could talk to you for the next
12 years, and you won't have an opportunity to ask me whatever you'd like
to ask me. So I'm gonna shut up.

You're doing a great job of covering a lot of the questions we were
going to ask. I would love to hear your story. And how you got
involved in ag, and why you started this journal, and how that's
developed.

I don't doubt that you would. But I'm not sure that my story's gonna be
interesting. But let me give you a thumbnail and then you tell me
whether you want more.

My mother is Puerto Rican. English is my second language. I grew up in
the barrio. I have degrees in the fine arts. I was a professional
musician and singer. I was a ballet dancer. I was an actor. And then
I decided that my two passions, not the things I was good at, but the
two things I cared most about, which was this genetic memory for
farming, whatever it was...whenever I'd see an image that had anything
to do with a general farm type situation, it just flipped every switch
inside of me...and the fine arts of painting and drawing and ceramics
and so forth. So I, having finished high school in Southern California,
had to make a decision, and I was accepted in many places, but I decided
to go to the San Francisco Art Institute. While I was there, in the
latter part of that experience, and I have graduate degrees, I started
farming on a very small scale. Left there and moved to Oregon to take
any job I could, managing anything in agriculture. I managed a
commercial broiler operation, 88,000 birds. I managed an
organic goat dairy. I managed purebred Angus cattle operations and
sheep ranches. I went to trade school to become a licensed and
certified artificial insemination technician for cattle and studies
cattle genetics. At the time I was given a job managing a purebred
Angus ranch for the chairman of the International Trade Commission, and
he was flying me around to buy bull semen and to show me off at cocktail
parties.

So I spent time in Washington DC and got inside those circles
and...things troubled me in those circles. When I was able to I bought
my first farm and a team of horses. And I knew, because all my personal
experiences had been with organic gardening or farming since San
Francisco...I had a house with a half-acre yard that was an organic...I
call it my farm, but it was an organic garden, out near the ocean in the
Sunset district. So I bought my first 77-acre farm and didn't have
enough money for tractors, got another team of horses and was doing
everything with mentors, organically, with horses, and got involved with
a handful of people who...we all identified that we needed to do
something to help with the marketing, so I was part of the group that
formed Organically Grown Incorporated back in the early '70's. Because
I couldn't shut up and because it was pretty glamorous to see this guy
out there working six head of horses on a two bottom plow, I got a lot of
media exposure, and that spread all over, and people started to get in
touch with me. A guy came and did a series of interviews and pictures
for a chapter in a book by Readers' Digest called Back to Basics. And
that chapter was about me. That had even more people calling and an
article on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal, and the people
that were calling me were saying, "Where can I get harness, where can I
get a team of horses, how can I learn about growing green beans
organically?" Lots of questions. So I had this idea that maybe I could
do, on a kitchen table, do a small newsletter and augment my farm
income. My father, who was very interested in what I was doing, made
the case and he said, "Why don't you do it four times a year? Why don't
you make it a big magazine like the old ones that used to lay out on the
table?" He said, "I'll throw some money at it, we'll get this thing
going, but I want you to realize that there's not that much information
and in about 3 or 4 years you're gonna run out of stuff to write about."
That was 35 years ago. My father's now 95.

So we produced that first issue and put an ad in Organic Gardening and
Farming Magazine and we got 800 subscribers immediately. And it's just
gone on from there. Because of the experience I had working for the
bureaucrat, managing his ranch, and because of what I was doing with the
magazine, I got involved in state and local task forces and projects and
feasibility studies. I was on several boards and I worked during the
late '70's as an unregistered lobbyist for the Lane economic development
council, the Amenity Foundation, a number of organizations, going back to
Washington DC to raise money for them. And I used that also as an
opportunity to make connections for the publication and get information.
And that just further cauterized my feeling about how things were wrong
and how they could be. And so I've been blabbing about it ever since,
I've written 14 books, I've delivered more keynote addresses and
lectures and presentations than I can possibly count. I'm old enough
now that occasionally I'll say, "Ah, that's right! I remember that, I
was at Amherst!" Completely forgot about it.

But we are small, small, small potatoes. We are the proverbial sand in
the clamshell. I don't know that we'll be around to see the pearl, but
it's forming.

Are you farming still also?

Trying. I've been on a sabbatical for about 2 or three years as things
have sloughed off. And now I've sold 49% of the business, so I'm
getting back to it. This is a picture of our place, which is 16 miles
north of here. We have no neighbors for 10 miles in any direction.
Surrounded by Forest Service ground. And it's my dream to get back to
the farming. I mean, I paint all the time now. I write in the morning,
I paint at night, I try to farm in the daytime, and the farming is the
thing that gets sacrificed when I have to come in here.

It is either contradiction or the ultimate hypocracy that what you see
here are all these computers. And for me I have to work on two
Macintoshes and eleven PCs constantly, just to keep everything going.

So. Questions.

Yeah. You...

But my story's not important.

It is...

No, no, no, no. Use whatever I say any way you want to, but what I'm
saying is, I don't want to be an example. What we are is a funnel, what
we are, and this could be a good or bad word, we are an enabler for this
agrarian revolution.

I'm working on an editorial right now, I just came up with something.
Sometimes you just put two words together and you think, well why didn't
I ever think of that before? I'm trying to understand what this means.
It could be good, it could be bad, but it's bouncing around in my head.
And the two words are "civilian agriculture." Because what we have had
is a military agriculture, or a...not militant, but this
institutionalized, industrialized agriculture has lost its...its
civility, certainly, but its also lost its civilian aspects. And I
figured, if I'm permitted to stay at this for another 10 or 20 years,
I'll get something right.

You're not happy with the way that there's a sort of a pop culture
around farming and food right now it sounds like...

Well no, I think we need to differentiate there. I don't have a
problem with a pop culture notion per se...what I have a problem with is
this kind of coattail aspect of what's hip and what's not hip. I know
that sounds like they're one and the same, but how do I separate that...
For example: although I don't buy into it because of my age, or whatever
it is, I can see that the so-called hip hop culture, which is a pop
culture, has managed, for whatever reason, to etch itself into our
society in a way that's much more ingrained than, say, whatever was the
surfing culture. Or whatever was the disco culture. Does that make
sense? It's almost like a tattoo in the sense that it feels like...not
that it's going to stay the same and last a long time, but that it's
gonna last a long time and that it's breeding. There's something coming
out of that.

So I'm not casting against necessarily pop culture, but the
taste-makers, the ones that would have you believe...they're the ones
that are going to decide what the next big thing is. And when they do,
whatever the last big thing is, it's so gone...does that make sense?

It does. But what I'm curious about is...I mean, you're referring to
some of these things as "the enemy," which is a string word...

Yes.

...and what would you like to see in their place? For all the
non-farmers out there, who are most of the people who are in that
discussion, what would you like to see them seeing?

I would like to see, and maybe this is asking way too much; what I would
like to see is that people be more willing to make more of an
investment, okay? For example, instead of having their reading
experience be defined by a bowel movement or what is the first thing
they see on a home page, to actually read something. To actually read
an entire book by Wendell Berry. Or an entire book by Gary Nabham. Or,
if they don't want to go that direction, let me share a book with you
that everybody should know about and nobody does. {gets up and searched
through shelves} It's fiction. Written by the woman who wrote Lost In
Translation. And an amazing book about food. In a way that is so
completely...I mean, you can't go through the experience of this without
feeling fully permeated. {laughs} Can a person feel permeated?

Sounds like a great quote to have on the binding.

{laughs} My daughter...I have two daughters, 15 and 33. My older
daughter married a Frenchman. Juliete and Alexis Poullion. They have
avineyard and an organic farm in Lyle, Washington on the Columbia River.
Alexis' mother, Nora Pouillon, had the first organic restaurant in the
US, in Washington DC, Restaurant Nora's. She is the lover of an
Italian, who started something called Slow Food. All of that is to say,
nepotism, whatever you want to call it. Small world stuff.

The Slow Food movement is very interesting. It has aspects of pop
culture, it has aspects of this other insidious taste-making, transitory,
paper-thin stuff that we're talking about also. But the idea that you
take your time with some of this, be willing to make that investment, is
where you start to realize this.

When I was 10 years old, on the island of Puerto Rico, one of the
initiation rites...{chuckles} Someday I'm gonna write this story,
because it's one of those stories I never think of when I'm writing, but
every time I remember it, it stops me cold. At Christmastime is a
tradition to roast an entire pig in the ground. And it takes ten,
twelve hours, and there's a long ritual process. I hire out to roast a
pig in the ground now. I did one a year ago in Maine for a meeting for
the Conservancy. I did one at my daughter Juliet's wedding. And
every time I do, I remember this initiation right.

When this pig, that had been wrapped in banana leaves and red clay after
all the seasonings and everything had been done, is lovingly lowered
into a bed of coals that have been covered with palm fronds to create
steam, then covered with dirt...that was done out, the first time I
experienced this, on the banks of the big mountain in Puerto Rico, El
Yunke... My job, in this courtyard where they buried this pig...there
was a little stone wall all the way around...this is a terrifying image,
but it's real...they used it as the Colosseum where they would fight
roosters. And around the outside edge of this they had these little
huts and they would stake a rooster out, so there was all these fighting
roosters staked out. A rain forest, palm trees and banana trees. In the
middle of this, this dirt ring. And in the middle of that they buried a
pig and they set out this, I don't even remember what it was they gave
me to sit on, and they gave me a stick. And they said, "your job is to
stay awake all night. And when the wild dogs come from the rain forest,
your job is to make sure they don't dig that pig out." I was 10 years
old.

The men in the family would dress up like what were called jibaros,
which were bums who live in the forest, like Hispanic gypsies, whatever
you want to call them. So this thing had its own peculiar Puerto Rican
aspect to it that was almost voodoo in nature. And they're out there
making all kinds of noises all night long while I am terrified guarding
the pig.

And for me, that is...that's what you cannot make into something
transitory. That...speaks to the fabric of the culture, to go beyond,
way, way beyond what it meant to raise that pig, what it meant to be
capable of killing that pig and dressing it and preparing it, to this
other ritual and rite of passage and all that stuff. That's the
ultimate of slow food.

So at my daughter's wedding, my son and I raised a pig on our ranch. My
son butchered it. I prepared it, and we put it in the ground at the
vineyard. And Nora from Slow Food shows up with all these folks from
all over the world for the wedding, and she's horrified at the prospect
that the wedding meal is going to come out of a hole in the ground.
And I said, "this is absolutely the ultimate slow food experience." I
had to hold her hand. You know how a woman can be at her son's wedding,
and everything had to be just so-so. Now imagine that this is a
French-Austrian woman with a restaurant...and we have lowered a pig in
the dirt!

And all these guys come out in the middle of the day, they're drunk, we
have a tripod, and we're all trying to get this pig in one piece out of
the ground and over to where we can open the whole thing up and serve
it, because it has been stuffed with fruits and sausages and all sorts
of...stuffing mix and the whole thing's been coated in achiote
paste...it's a ritual.

And for me, I can't do that without remembering the stick, all night
long. And the whole full-circle thing is just overpowering. What
really made it for me was that all these folks that came, who were
prepared to be disgusted, they still talk about that wedding feast from
three years ago, that it was...nothing like that had ever happened.

And that's...that's speaking to what we're talking about here. We might
be saying, "Okay, we know Thelma and Bruce, and they want to have at
least 40 acres, and they're gonna try and grow organically, and they
want a CSA and they're gonna grow corn and they're gonna have some
eggs...", all those patterns. But for me...that's why I go back to Gary
and to The Last Chinese Chef and these models that are the stories we
need to revisit and cherish. Because they talk about how deep all of
this is. The connective tissue. So, when I hear that somebody who
credits me with the philosophy to start a marketing co-op to buy milk
from the Amish, 'cause they're gonna save the Amish, and he destroys 200
years worth of culture that went into these cheese varieties, and that
whole process...I don't think enemy is too string a word.

There's nothing frivolous about this. So when I read in an article that
some New York food writer says..."Arugula. I just like the way it
sounds when I say it," I think to myself, that's paper thin! And why
does it feel like, when I hear that, I need to say something 'cause
they're taking something away from us.

I'm sorry, I'm getting carried away. This is not what you wanted!
{laughs} I've said too much, I know I've said too much.

Ag Video Thursday: Polk County, North Carolina

2011-02-24T15:04:00.000-05:00

Kacy, one of the authors on this blog, works with the Polk County Agricultural Development Office in Mill Spring, North Carolina. Polk County is south of Asheville and Hendersonville, just up from the South Carolina border and includes the towns of Saluda, Columbus, and Tryon.

Eric and Lynn Turner have an HD Media company based in the same building as Kacy, an old being-renovated-at-the-moment brick school building with a lot of potential. In that building, a community is forming that includes Soil and Water, ag development people, artists, and farm marketers.

Last year, the Turners produced this lovely "Meet Your Farmer" video, with the simple intent to promote agriculture there in Polk County. The music comes from Tim McMorris, a talented and uplifting songwriter. It just makes you feel good to be (or want to be) a farmer on any scale! Enjoy.

Galatia, Illinois: Randy Anderson

2011-02-18T16:07:00.006-05:00

You know, we ARE trying to be stewards of the land. I look at it like this. I look at the land and it's almost like a vehicle. Okay, if you take this vehicle out here and you drive it back and forth to town just as hard as you can drive it, every trip you go, there's not going to be very many trips left in that vehicle.

In Benton, Illinois, on a hot day, we stopped at the local library to do some research and cool down. We chatted with the librarian about our project, told her of our search for farmers, and she vanished for a few minutes. When she emerged she had a sticky note with Randy Anderson's number and a smiley face on it.

Currently, Randy is recuperating from an injury that has his arm immobilized in a sling. Two young boys played on the floor of his home, playing with John Deer tractor toys. Their house is set on the same farm that Randy grew up on, amongst long Illinois crops, with typical grain storage bins in the driveway. He farms about 3,000 acres of corn, soybeans, and winter wheat. In this interview, he speaks of Roundup Ready crops and Bt corn. These both refer to genetically engineered crops, a hot topic in agriculture.

I'm part of the system and I'm part of the victim. All of my soybeans are Roundup Ready. Yeah, it's nice and easy to do. The thing is, trying to grow traditional soybeans, there's not enough seed companies out there, and the majority of the companies are not concentrating any of their new development bringing any of the new traits, new genetics to the forefront as a traditional seed. Meaning increased yield. They put everything into this here other seed that's already got all the traits to it and then they send it out here...it's kind of like walking onto a car lot and you got this model here to choose from but every model has got the same stuff on it except each one of them's a different color. And then you go over to these other models and they don't got nothing. They got stick shifts and no air conditioning. That there's kind of like that traditional seed.

Randy seemed more skeptical than many of the farmers we spoke with, first suspecting us of having an "environmental" bent to our project. We assured him that we didn't, and he started talking; nearly 20 minutes went by before we even asked our first full question.

A lot of people has a view that, you know, the farmer's out here and we're destroying the environment and we don't really care about what's going on.

I recommend reading this full interview; from a commodity farmer's perspective he speaks of politics, genetic engineering, pesticide use, and family history.

Click here to read the full interview.

Do you have any questions for us before we start?

Well, um...Is this an environmental issue or anything?

What do you mean?

Most of the people out here that is in agriculture do have an aspect of looking out for the environment instead of just...a lot of people has a view that, you know, the farmer's out here and we're destroying the environment and we don't really care about what's going on.

Well, if you want to talk about that then feel free. We don't have a take on it...

Okay. Okay, I just wanted to ask...sometimes this stuff is used...you know, we ARE trying to be stewards of the land. I look at it like this. I look at the land and it's almost like a vehicle. Okay, if you take this vehicle out here and you drive it back and forth to town just as hard as you can drive it, every trip you go, there's not going to be very many trips left in that vehicle. Same way with that land, if you go out there and you farm that land and you farm it to where you're not as friendly, like to help reduce erosion, and try to use the least amount of chemicals as possible, which...

You know, the least amount of chemicals possible, is more economical for me! 'Cause every time, if we do have to spray, I mean, that's money that I'm having to put into the inputs of that crop. And doing that in that type of manner, and using just the minimal amount of fertilizer on the ground, instead of just overloading the ground with fertilizer. Whenever it's overloaded like that, then when excessive rains come, it will wash down the streams and things of that nature. Just like as if the ground's been worked up in a manner, comes excessive rains, it's gonna wash down the rivers.

Sayin' all that...if the soil's washed away...that gets back to the vehicle; you're just a-runnin' it as hard as you can. And once that soil is gone, it's gone. You know, they're not making any more of it! That's the way I look at it. It'll never grow like what it did prior to being washed away.

So, that's one of my takes on, if you don't take care of the land, the land's not going to take care of you.

Sometimes there's people, they develop all these regulations, and I don't think they ever had a clue of what took place out here in the countryside. All they've ever become accustomed to is, is a concrete sidewalk and thirty-story buildings and all they ever look out's a glass window. And they think what they see on TV is just the Gospel, you know? But I mean, I'm just one feller, and there's thousands of us out here.

And what's agrivating too, from my aspect of it, is, you know, in this country we try to produce a very economical and reasonably priced food source. But then you take some of your bigger companies and they'll go out and we'll have food and things imported in from, say, Mexico. Well, there's chemicals that they're using in Mexico that we have done long outdated and said, "No, we can't use them in the United States!" But people's more interested in buying that cheaper stuff as they are looking out for their health later on down the road. That makes me sit here, I'm following all the regulations, trying to do all the right things, but my food's not good enough...

And more expensive.

Yeah!

But I've been on this farm...I was raised here. I'm 38 years old, and whenever I was old enough to drive a tractor, probably 10, 12 years old...that's what I've done all my life. There's times that I've looked back and thought, "Well, maybe I should've left and went on to school, and maybe done something else or something or other." Something that's an easier life. 'Cause in my profession, I feel that...you know, I do have control over some things and there's a lot of things I have no control over whatsoever.

The control factor is, I'm the one that makes the decision what I'm gonna do TODAY, whether I'm gonna go to work or we're gonna have some leisure. But whenever I go to work, if it's time to, for instance, be planting a crop, or mowing some pastures, or even getting ready for harvest...my day might start at 7:00 in the morning and it might not end till 9:00 that night. It's not like it's a nine-to-five job. As I say, there's a lot people out there who, all they've got invested in their job is a dinner bucket. You go to work for a company, yeah, there's people out there who went to school and they've got a college education...yeah, they've got that. They're an educated person. They've spent that money to get that. Now they're hunting them a job to pay that bill to pay that education off, okay. So let's say you get that education paid off. Yeah, you've retained that knowledge, nobody can ever take that away from you. But you're working for somebody else. And you're working for a paycheck. You've got an automobile, and your car payment, but that automobile's getting you to work. In essence, that's you're only real true expense, where, in our line of work here, it's a business, in essence. I've got capital and overhead. Machinery. Expenses. I've got money invested out there to go out there and put that crop out. Not necessarily the fertilizer and the chemicals and things of that nature, and then I've got labor and so forth.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people, they've got hard jobs. And I've got hard jobs, you know, but it's...it's a life that's all I could do. It's discouraging when you talk to somebody and they just don't have no inclination of where their food comes from. I have a friend, he's got a website, and one of his comments this week...and he's a fellow farmer too...is trying to get across to people where their food comes from. There was a statistic that 50% of the people still believe that food comes from the farm, and the other 50% think that the food comes from the grocery store. The other story is, you run across people that think chocolate milk has to come from brown cows. {Laughs}.

It's like, on my farm, the corn I produce is white corn. Okay? That goes into corn tortillas, masa, Tostito chip, things of that nature. I get paid a little bit extra money for growing just white corn instead of regular yellow corn. Your regular yellow corn can still go into making corn chips and things of that nature, but then a lot of times it goes into feed production for feedin' livestock. What' neat is, sometimes whenever I go to the grocery store with my wife or family, or even myself, and I pick up that bag of white tortillas or whatever...you know, that mighta come off of my farm! You know, you have that...oh, I wouldn't call it that warm fuzzy feeling, but it still makes you feel important.

But there has been tough years. We had one back in...ah, it was 2002. It would be just like...I told a guy, "Now, you just imagine that you've got a $10 an hour job. Or $20 an hour job. And you've got at home $8 an hour worth of expenses on this $20 an hour job. So then that leaves you $12 to go and buy extra goodies. Your luxury items, things that you don't have to have. But in that year, instead of me making, for instance that $20 an hour, I brought in $5 an hour. But I still had that $8 an hour worth of expenses. So we got $3 an hour going in the hole, and a year like that...it took four years to recover from that, with the work of a good bank that's willing to work with you.

Here's the thing, I can put the right amount of fertilizer on, I can spray the correct chemicals at the correct time, I can buy the best seed that can be bought. I can plant it all in a timely fashion. I can harvest it all exactly when I feel it's possible to be harvested. But if it doesn't get the right amount of precipitation on it, rain, it doesn't make any difference what I did. That's where you lose control. You gotta have faith. With God. That's just the way Iook at it. You know, you get a closer feeling, that somebody else is in control besides yourself.

My father, he was a farmer. I was probably 18 years old when I first drove my first tractor. It was a little old Cub Farm-All. Next thing you know, I'm driving a bigger tractor. I can remember the first field I ever worked with a disc on a tractor. I'd go down and I was discing this field...a little like mowing a yard, you know, if you drive too wide, you're gonna skip. Well, I was out there and I'd drive too wide and I'd skip, and I'd raise the disc up, go back there where I started skipping and I'd drop the disc back in, here I go! I didn't want Dad to show up and see that I'd been skipping and all that! He showed up and he'd say, "Son, what's these here marks out there?" I said, "Well, that's just where I missed." He said, "That's alright." He said, "You don't know until you do it yourself."

And my daddy gave me a good work ethic, to where when I was out there working, as you could say, side by side with him, he gave me an interest in something or other. We used to raise fattening hogs, where we'd buy feeder pigs, pigs that weigh anywhere between 30 and 50 pounds. We'd raise them up and fatten them off ourself. And this was back in...oh, the early '90's, shortly after I was graduating high school. We'd run about 150 head of pigs, and we's running them on the ground, not on concrete. They had a building to get inside and they had free run of the ground and all that. That's when a lot of the movement was going to confinement hog operations. Whenever I'd take my pigs in to sell, there towards the end, they was taking the hogs in and they done what they called "grade and yield." That there's based upon back fat, how fat your hog is, how it's gonna kill out, how it's gonna dress out, whether it's gonna be a lot of lean meat or if it's gonna be a fettier annimal. My hog that was raised on the ground, you know, he's out there in tougher conditions. If it's cold outside, well he's gonna have more fat on him, you know, 'cause he's gonna have to stay warmer. Where them hogs that was on confinement, they had more of a controlled environment.

The last hogs I took off I cleared $5 a head. And I told dad, I said, "You know what? We'll go out, and I'll go try to find me another 20 or 50 acres to rent." Cause I said I'm not gonna mess with these pigs anymore. For $5 a head...and it took me four months to get that $5! {laughs} You know, and it just took all the fun out of it. That's why a lot of the commercial confinement operations is still in business, is cause they can control more of the factors that I couldn't control. And I don't agree with everything that they've done...it's like you go buy pork chops in town and so forth, which...meat you buy at the grocery store's gonna taste different than if I took meat off my farm and took it to a locker or a local processer and had him butcher an animal for myself, brought home. It just don't taste the same; I don't know what it is, it just don't taste the same.

Just seems like things is just not always as good as what they used to be. I mean, there's so many things that I don't quite agree with anymore...I feel I produce as good a product or anything that I can out here on the farm, but by the time it gets to the consumer it's been messed with; I feel somewhat inferior. What I mean about that is, some of these foods that have a lot of preservatives and things of that nature in them...you wonder in your mind sometimes, why there is so many people that does have cancers. I mean, you can go to the grocery store and there's them summer sausages sitting there at the checkout lane, and they're stacked, laying there on the shelf, and they're not 'fridgerated are they? There's enough stuff in them that they're not rotting, and you're sitting there wondering, "I wonder how healthy that really is." {laughs} I mean, there's nothing wrong with dehydrated beef jerkey, don't get me wrong, cause there's no moisture in that! It's just some of them other things {laughs}.

Was this the farm that you grew up on?

Yes.

And is it the same size or have you gotten bigger?

We've gotten bigger. There's been some property that, you know, a next-door neighbor, he was looking to retire and we was able to purchase some tract. Our neighbor might have passed on and the estate put the property up for same and we bought it.

Dad, whenever I was little, started off with about 350 acres and since that time we've owned about 750 acres.

Is that what you're farming or are you leasing some also?

I lease some too. Total acrerage is somewhere up around 3,000 acres.

Over the phone you said you were doing some winter wheat, soy, corn...and some cow/calf?

Yeah. And the cow/calf, reason we got them is we got some land here with the house that's not very productive for rowcrop farming. It's better to be grazed then to work it up and try to produce something on it. The farm's always, as far as I've know, has always had cows. Actually, the way I got my start off in the cows is, when my dad was retiring he told me, "Now I'm gonna give you these cows but you gotta promise me one thing." And I said, "Well, what's that?" And at that time we had around 25 head of cows. And he said, "Every cow that goes off this farm as gotta go up there to pay for that house that you just bought." I said, "Well, I don't have no problem with that." He'd went down to the bank with me and I'd bought a house and 10 acres. Like I said, at the time he was retiring, and he said, like I said, "You can have these cows but every cow or any of the livestock that goes this farm, the money you get out of 'em's gotta go into that house payment for that loan." But that didn't include whenever I had to go put up hay and paying for expenses of cutting hay and things of that nature, you know, there was them expenses in there! But that made me draw a respect for him that...it made me earn that house. He didn't give me those cows and he didn't give me that house. I still had to work to feed those animals during the summertime, during the wintertime, keeping the fences up, and keeping them fed and taken care of. But then they helped provide for me, giving me a place for me and my wife to get started off with our family. I took a house up there and within 6 years...I payed the loan off in 6 years.

So, did you transition pretty easily from your father to you?

Yeah. My dad, he was very...he was up in his years when he got married. He was 40 years old and he married a woman that was 20 years younger than him. He told me, "Here I am working myself to death and I don't have any kids and I'm gonna have to get me a family started to leave some of this to. 'Cause at that time he'd had probably a couple hundred acres that he owned. Him and my mom got married and the year after they got married, I come along. That just thrilled him to death he'd got a son. I just growed up, like I said, in the farm. Soon as I got old enough to go out to the field and ride with him in the combine or something or other, I'd be right there. My mother, whenever I got up to probably 4 or 5 years old, she got the opportunity to get a job outside the house and that helped bring a little bit more income in to the house. She was a rural letter-carrier. She left 7:30 in the morning, and then she didn't get home till 3:00. During the summer months, then, I was with dad all the time. Dad was my daycare! You know, that gave me a knowledge of respect of others, your older people. And a work ethic too. Just not set around here and watch television and things of that nature and drink sody pops and eat tater chips all the time. I always remember, especially on Saturday mornings, as a kid, you always want to sleep in or watch cartoons up till mid-morning. But 9:00, buddy! "Son! You better get out here, it's time to get to work!" I always respected my dad for that.

Then he passed away when he was 71. It was 2001 wen he passed away. He'd had diabetes. You know, it was tough that year, and then the next year was 2002 and I had the bad year I was talking about. So you had two bad years; yeah, a good crop year on year, but you still had the drama of dealing with your father passing away. At that time, it was probably 5 to 6 years there that I was the one in control of the operation, making day to day decisions because he'd retired and was drawing social security. But there was still...you always had that crutch to go back to. You wanted to come in to ask a question, you always had somebody to ask. If you wanted to, say, drive around and look at the crops and see how things are doing. That was gone. And that was tough, very tough. 'Cause then I was the only one making those decisions. You can make one wrong decision and everything's gone.

What do you see the future of this being? Are these guys interested (the two boys on the floor)?

Uh...one of 'em's pretty interested and the other one's semi-interested. One of them, he has an inspiration that he wants to possibly go to school, and then he would like to be a fertilizer plant manager. Or a fertilizer dealer, where he would sell chemicals and fertilizer and seed to other farmers and take care of them. And then the other one, he wants to be a part of the operation and he wants his brother to work with him, and have another one of his friends help. Myself, I would like to see one of the two take an interest in the farm and still want to farm. You put all this here time and effort together, building a little something or other to leave to your other family members later on. You do hate to see it just dismantled, I guess you could say. It's almost kind of like, for instance, you know when you have a family name and you're the last one of that name. Yeah, there might be some more Andersons out there somewhere, but it might be the last of that line. I'm not saying carrying on a legacy, but it's just kind of carrying on a family tradition.

But my dad's dad, my grandpa, he was a farmer, but he was a farmer and a hobbyman and he had 12 kids. They lived on a farm down there and they had 80 acres. Of those 12 kids, 9 of them was girls. So it was my dad, and then he had two brothers. The youngest child of the family was a boy. Dad was basically the only one of them that took an interest in farming. Garndpa, he just did it because he had the 80 acres and he had the help to grit it out! The girls worked just like the boys. I always remember my dad talking about, whenever they'd go out and pick corn by hand. He was the guy that always got to pick what they called the down-row. When you take a team of horses and a wagon out in the corn field, you'll be three people. There'll be a person on each side of the wagon and then there'll be a person on the back of the wagon. Then you're driving that team of horses and the wagon through the field and them there rows that the wagon's driving over, that's called the down-row. Well, that corn's already laying down and you gotta get down and shuck that ear off and bend over and pick it up. Well, that was his job, to pick that. He said, sometimes they would get out in front of the horses or the mules and he would pick it and throw it back into the wagon. He always would tell me, he said, "there was always that one old mule, dang it, he'd bite me in the head!" You know, nip at him! So...here on the farm we never did have any horses!

What would be some ideal changes you'd like to see in the larger ag system?

Well...one of the things I'd like to see changed is, for instance, there's a very large chemical company that has a very large contolling interest in agriculture. There's people out here in the farming community I would safely say that feel somewhat like I do, that they control too much of what's being brought to the forefront of...some of the seed and technology things that's brought out here. You'uns probably know what company I'm talking about.

I'm part of the system and I'm part of the victim. All of my soybeans are Roundup Ready. Yeah, it's nice and easy to do. The thing is, trying to grow traditional soybeans, there's not enough seed companies out there and the majority of the companies are not concentrating any of their new development bringing any of the new traits, new genetics to the forefront as a traditional seed. Meaning increased yield. They put everything into this here other seed that's already got all the traits to it and then they send it out here...it's kind of like walking onto a car lot and you got this model here to choose from but every model has got the same stuff on it except each one of them's a different color. And then you go over to these other models and they don't got nothing. They got stick shifts and no air conditioning. That there's kind of like that traditional seed.

The elevators now are trying to pay a little bit higher price for some of the traditional seed, but sometimes the added chemical cost that you have to put on the traditional seed doesn't offset what you're trying to get. Like on my white corn, all of it is what you consider non-GMO white corn. It's not got the Bt trait in it, but I'm not against that trait in that aspect because you can go and buy that Bt at some of your organic stores if you're gonna treat organic corn, 'cause it is a bacteria that you dust your corn with to keep the bugs from eating on it. Only thing, they put that bacteria inside the plant. Whether that's good or bad, that's to be seen too, I don't know. But I'd rather have something like that in the corn than to go buy, say, summer sausages that been injected with no tellin' how much formaldehyde to keep it from rotting to start with, right?

This year it was available to us; there was actually Bt white corn available for me to purchase. I declined to purchase it; for one thing they was gonna give me a discount at the elevator 'cause they're gonna segregate it, make sure they don't get it mixed up with non-Bt white. I didn't want to have to worry about whenever I was harvesting corn whether this field was non-Bt and this field over here was Bt. We've took some measures in the last couple of years, cause I've been growing white corn for the last 10, 15 years off and on, and about 5 years ago we had a late summer drought. The corn plant got up there and got almost towards maturity, and then some of these here corn hybrids, they're bred to be like that. They call them racehorse hybrids. They put everything to that ear that they can possibly put in there to make a good ear of corn. They'll do what they call cannabalize on theirself. If there's not enough moisture, for instance, in the soil, it will start sucking the moisture out of the plant to put it to the ear. To make sure it's gonna put a good ear of corn out there. And sayin' all that, there was some other plant diseases that hit it, and a bunch of that corn went down. Make a long story short, we had about 500 acres of corn that we had to harvest and it ruined the combine. We was taking in so much dirt 'cause the corn had fell down, the stock quality was so poor. But now, for the last 3, 4 years we been using a fungicide to help on diseases that come in and want to attack that corn later on in the season. Our plant health has increased tremendously. Trying different alternatives like that versus planting Bt.

So would you like some of these seed companies to develop something similar to Roundup Ready just to get some wider genetics out there?

Well, not necessarily even Roundup Ready. I'd just like some of the seed companies to develop just, you know...I mean, have a traditional seed but have some of the new...

Focus on yield...

Focus on yields! 'Cause I mean...Roundup Ready's fine and dandy but I can show you a field down here that we planted June the 23rd. Everytime we'd get ready to go plant it we'd till the ground all up. Everytime we decided to go plant it, we knew it was gonna rain, so I wouldn't plant it, and it was already wet ground to start with. So, like I said, finally, June 23rd we decided to go plant it. Well, instead of working it up again and losing what moisture I did have there, 'cause it was starting to get dry, we had some weeds out there, and they was up yay high. I knew when I planted into them that I wasn't gonna kill them. I mean, we put Roundup on 'em. Well, it wasn't actually Roundup, it was a generic, but it's glyphosate, and we put it on there and, as I say, we made 'em real sick. About 3 weeks later, about a week ago, they was just starting to get as green as what they was when I planted into 'em. Come to find out, them's resistant! And they're gonna make seed! For instance, one of them pigweed plants, they'll produce about 180,000 seeds. So okay, you got one plant out there that's resistant, so now he's got 180,000 more...he'll produce maybe 18,000 resistant seeds and the rest of 'em may be not resistant. That's one of the things, we're having to use different chemistries to control some of the weeds 'cause of the Roundup Ready deal.

Some people, I've got different farmers that are planting Roundup Ready corn, then they'll plant Roundup Ready beans, and they're hust continually Roundup Ready, and that's like a trainwreck waiting to happen. To me it is. It's kind of like fighting a cold and everytime you go to the doctor he gave you penicillen. Okay, eventually you're gonna get so sick that it doesn't make any difference how much penicillen he's gonna give you, it ain't gonna work, is it?

Because you develop an immunity...

Right {snaps}, it gets a resistance. Kind of like, you know, you'uns have head of them superbugs? Like MRSA and all them. There's certain antibiotics that's gonna take care of that. Well, it's like some of these weeds out there, they...don't die. {laughs}

Any other questions?

Well, I'm curious, do you have issues growing a different kind of corn, surrounded by so much other corn with pollination...

Yeah, I have to watch...well, like even issues of growing my traditional corn with, for instance, Bt corn beside of it. Yeah, it does cross pollinate somewhat. I can't help that. The main issue I have is like, for instance, if I got my regular corn and my neighbors got Roundup Ready corn. And then when he sprays his Roundup Ready corn, he need to know which way the wind's blowing. I don't care how good you are. They make drift-retardant products, products to keep chemicals from drifting that we spray. I use those products. But a lot of it you gotta use common sense. I've had a field where, I didn't spray it, but the neighbor had a commercial applicator spray it. Here's these here two corn fields and the only way you can really tell my corn field from the neighbor's corn field is there's a post down here in the field that's the property line, and here's a post up here at the other end. But you come around with a sprayer and you got the boom, and you think, well maybe it's in line...but you're setting in that cab and it's 40 foot over there to the end of that boom! {laughs} Boy, they come up there and they sprayed, and they was one row over too far. It killed one row of corn all the way up through there.

I had some issues back this spring too, where they sprayed a neighbor's corn with another product they call Ignite. Used to be Liberty. There's some corn out there that's resistant. The custom applicator, they didn't flush out their spray rig good. The guy running the spray rig, he though, well it'll be alright, this stuff here kills just like Roundup does. Well that wasn't Roundup corn! There was a small amount in there...it didn't kill the corn, but it just made it so sick, it's like it's froze in time. They've got insurance that's gonna pay him 'cause of their accident, but them on the other edge, whenever they was spraying down there beside me, they didn't watch what they was doing, they had the booms up too high, and the wind was a-blowing a bit more that what it needed to be, and it drifted onto some of my rows of corn, almost killed them too. So that's the main thing you gotta watch out for is the drift and something or other on that.

What do you think that the role of the farmer in our society should be?

{sighs} I feel that he should be a person that has a knowledge of what he's out there doing. And that he should have a knowledge of doing it in a manner that is not only environmentally friendly and safe to the environment, but its gonna be safe to his own well-being to his self and his family. And it's gonna be productive enough that him and his family will make a living off of it, and that he won't necessarily be judged as...you know, there's a lot of people... I'm an individual on this operation. And I go down here to the next neighbor and he's an individual. But you talk to some people and they think, well you're just a corporate farm. There is some families that have formed corporations. And they've done that for various benefits of their own well-being. Sometimes there's family farms and there might be 10 families, say, feeding out of that operation. But saying all that, let's say those 10 families is farming 20,000 acres. You break that down, that's only 2,000 acres per family. They still have that sticker to them. You know what I'm trying to say. But they done that corporate thing for some other legal benefits to where maybe they'll be able to leave their farm for their family for the future.

I just feel that, as time keeps going on by, that the American farmer will be viewed...the majority of people will view him as a corporate farmer. Everything's just big business. And I don't like that because I feel I'm still the family farm. It's just me, my two sons, my wife, and my mom, she's still a part of this operation.

The thing, like I discussed earlier, that's a disouragement to me is that the American consumer is more interested in...importing in a car or a toy or various things of that nature is one thing. Importing in your food, that's another. Like I said, you don't know how that food's being handled.

How can we avoid that labeling of farmers?

Well...I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, I'm on a Farm Bureau board here in Saline County and we have a program we set up called Ag in the Classroom. We hired a lady and she goes into a classroom environment and she tries to teach kids where our food's coming from. You have two spectrums on that situation. I consider this a rural community. Our economic base is not agriculture-driven here; it's more of a coalmine-driven community, but still we're close to the land here. You have an educator on one side of the fence here that...he or she absolutely loves our person to come in and help educate, bring a curriculum in that's science-based and the kids can get credit for...to the whole other side where you'll have an educator and they don't even want you there. If they don't want you there, you're not gonna get time in your classroom, and who suffers here is the kids. They don't have that opportunity to learn where their food might come from and who's producing their food.

The true answer is, I don't really understand how it will ever become. There's so many more people in this country that are raised in the cities and suburbs that have no farming background whatsoever. I could go and talk to 10 people and, let's say 7 of them, "Oh, my grandpa used to farm." Or, "My dad used to farm." Or "My grandpa's got a farm." But they just go to visit that farm. And then when those people then have children, tehre's a possibility that the parent or grandparent's passed on. And that farm's gone. It just keeps getting further and further away.

The other side of that is, our government...you know, I'm enrolled in some of the farm program payments. A lot of people are like, "Oh, you draw money!" and all that...if they set up those programs and I qualify and I'm entitled to draw those moneys, I'm gonna take advantage of them. Because they was set up for us. Truth of the matter is, if there was high enough commodity prices and I made money and I never had to draw a government dime, that wouldn't bother me one bit. Just like everything that the government always gets involved with, whether it's health care to the banking industry, whatever they get theit teeth into, it's usually not very good. I've had older gentlemen tell me that they feel that someday the government could come out here and say, "Well...George Smith, you've drawed this amount of money off the government here and we want our money back or we're gonna take this land back away from you." And I tell you what, way I see it is, that could come to pass! They already put so many other regulations on us and if you don't comply with them, if you don't pay your federal income tax, they'll send you to the pokey, aint they?

One of the things I have difficulty with is property taxes. Paying property taxes, in essence, is just like you made a mortgage payment. You got a deed to this property, but you'll never own it. You know, our forefathers, they sailed all the way from England to this country all because of what? Taxes. And my grandfather, born around 1898 I think, he told my dad, he said, "Son, there will be a day that will come and the property taxes on the land that you take care of will be so high that you won't be able to pay and they'll come and get the land." Way that taxes keep raising and raising and raising, that will come to pass.

I put up a structure down here to store grain in, to help benefit my farming operation, to sell it more in a timely manner. I didn't have that there grain bin up 2 months. Guess who calls up. Tax assessor. Wanted to know how big it was. How many bushels it would store, all that. Got my tax bill the other day. Doubled. So, what encouragement does that give me as an individual to go out and better myself? To help improve my operation? Things like that's what I have difficulties with.

Thursday is Ag Video Day! The Plow That Broke the Plains, a 1937 propaganda film about the dust bowl.

2011-02-17T13:48:00.001-05:00

This is a record of land...of soil rather than people--a story of the Great Plains; the 400,000,000 acres of wind-swept grasslands that spread up from the Texas panhandle to Canada...a high, treeless continent, without rivers, without streams...A country of high winds, and sun...and of little rain...

In 1937, this film was released by the Resettlement Administration, and generally wags a finger at American farmers and farm policy. As a contemporary film to the dust bowl, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, it provides a fascinating bit of insight (and remarkable footage) into that era of agriculture.

The dust bowl changed the face of the country; I often wonder...if all of those families hadn't been forced to tie their chairs to their Fords and abandon their homesteads...how many of their descendants would still be there in the Midwest? Would L.A. have been smaller, and Wichita become a more major city?

At one time, during the homestead days, much of the Plains were divided into 40- or 80-acre parcels. Servicemen were offered many of them after WWI. But when most of them wandered away, those who stayed found thousands of acres available again, and those titles became consolidated...it was natural that 80-acre farm families suddenly grew to 500-acre farm families.

The next generation, many children went to WWII. If they returned, they had more options to move to cities, to go to college. Again, was it not natural for them to relocate, leaving their parents to sell off their farm eventually? Suddenly, a 500-acre farmer had more land available as his neighbors retired, and became a 1,000-acre farmer. As of 2007, the average South Dakota farm size was 1,401 acres (and the vast majority are still family operations, contrary to popular belief). This continues, and, amongst the popular small-farm and local-foods movements happening now, I wonder if there will ever be a movement to resettle the plains.

I have to wonder. In the meantime, enjoy this 1937 film about how the grasslands turned to dust, how "Wheat will win the war!", and why so many families headed to California in the '30's as their plow was covered over. It's 30 minutes long; make yourself comfortable and have a snack. And think about where that snack came from. --Trav--

LeRoy, Kansas: Lyle Fischer, LeRoy Coop Association.

2011-02-12T21:07:00.004-05:00

I lived here all my life. My dad worked in construction and farmed a little bit, but he never made a real livelihood out of farming. Had cattle and some hogs...raised seven kids. Took a lot of food to feed seven kids. I went on to school for four years and got my bachelors degree in business administration; had a buddy that was going to go to Cargill to work, and I said, "yeah, that wouldn't be so bad, working in a farm-type atmosphere."

Over in Burlington, Kansas, we drove down one of the extremely wide roads that made up the main street. We were looking for farmer contacts, and we spotted the local Farm Bureau service office. Popping our heads in, we were greeted by a couple of wonderful folks, all smiles and handshakes. One of them was Larry Gleue the local agent.

Larry listened to our story, told a few of his own (like the one about the farmer who has had a suspicious number of insurance claims for lightning-struck cows, or the one about Larry's aging father who refuses to be told that he's too old to farm...Larry won't let him on the tractor anymore), and then pulled out his cell phone to start calling farmers for us.

One of the contacts that he gave us was Lyle Fischer, who manages the LeRoy Co-op Association, a nearby grain elevator and agronomy service. Two days later, after enjoying the Coffey County Fair and a parade, we drove a few miles out to LeRoy to call on Lyle.

...Went to work here in 1976 as the assistant manager, getting the feed, the seed, all the supplies, worked the counter. We started spraying row crops back in '75, so we bought a sprayer pickup a couple of years later and I drove that in the summertime for awhile. Got to where that was taking too much time and I wasn't getting my stuff done in the office, so I quit doing that. 2001 I took over as general manager...nine years went by, and it doesn't seem like nine years! I don't know, I really don't have a good story to tell. It's just work!

A cooperative is member-owned. In 1960, fifty years ago, the farmers wanted something better for them. Competition-wise, they wasn't getting a fair shake in the market. So they decided to start a cooperative and own it themselves. From that it's grown to the membership we have now. But a co-op is member-ownership; you earn your membership by doing business there, or you can buy membership. Any money that's made at the end of the year is shared back to the people that have done business that year. So all the assets, the income, is returned back to the members, based on their annual purchases, unlike an independent elevator or grain business, where it goes in their own pocket.

We were sitting down with Lyle on his porch with an unobstructed view of his beautiful backyard and grain bins. He took us on a bit of an economic overview of the past few decades in farming; in the 70's and 80's when he was just starting out in the business the real issue was farmer debt and high interest. Interest on loans made to farmers was as high as 18% and many farmers were not able to keep afloat during those years.

1980 was a tough year. It was a dry year. Very, very dry. That hurt too, back with the interest and the dry year, people didn't raise a crop. And not too many people had crop insurance then.

In the 90's, the price for commodity crops were at rock bottom, which has changed today. While commodity crops command a better price these days, the catch for many farmers currently is the high price of inputs. Any natural or synthetic additions a farmer has to apply to the soil or crop is usually very expensive.

Lyle also has seen a lot of farmers working hard to reduce their pollution from chemicals and runoff. The government requirements are getting tighter and tighter and in this area nitrogen has been found in drinking water and phosphate in the lakes. Lyle believes that the government will continue to demand better and cleaner systems, and he has seen that most farmers are willing to comply with requests even before they are requirements. A lot of farmers in this area have lined their streams with filter strips which prevents runoff to some degree.

We asked him about the increasing size of these Midwest crop farms...are they getting bigger because they want to or because they have to to stay afloat?

I would say that most of them are getting bigger because they have to. Now, there's a few, I'm sure, that are getting bigger because of pride. You know, "I want to be bigger than the other guy." I could tell you a few of those. Most of them, I'd say, are getting bigger because they see the need to farm more acres to make their machinery pay. To me, I can't understand how they can put a quarter million dollars into a combine or $200,000 into a planter, and plant two or three thousand acres and make it work. I guess they have to. I spend $200,000 for a sprayer, but I can spray 30, 40,000 acres, generate a lot more income. Not necessarily profit, but a lot more income, cash flow, out of that machine. But when you run a quarter million dollar combine over 2,000 acres, I don't know, that's a lot of money per acre.

We also asked him about the negative press that chemicals often get in popular press, and how he feels about it:

I think the word "chemical" sounds like a hazardous material. Maybe the word "chemicals" is the wrong word to use. "Herbicide" is a better terminology to use. Herbicide is used by our customers to control weeds. Then there's pesticides. Pesticides are more for pest control, insects. Gosh...how do you tell the consumer that these chemicals are not hazardous to the food?

Herbicides are safe! They're out there to control weeds. The plant that grows, like the corn or soybean, is tolerant to those herbicides, so it doesn't bother that grain that's growing. I don't know.

I don't know if the consumer actually knows what it takes to raise a crop, to make the bread on his table and the eggs in his frying pan, I don't know if they do or not. Sometimes you wonder. I think...to me, the naturalist or whoever that thinks that we can feed the world on the way it was 50 years ago, is going to go hungry. We can't feed the world on 50-bushel {per acre} corn, 20-bushel beans. We have to have genetics, we have to have fertilizer, we have to have herbicides...we have to have those traits in these crops to make higher yields.

The GMO is the traits that they put in the plant so that the plant is resistant to the corn borer. Well, think about that. The corn borer, the corn root worm is being controlled genetically in the plant instead of using a pesticide. So the use of a true pesticide, the organophosphates that we used to use to control corn root worms, we don't use them anymore. We don't have to! Because the plant itself has got the gene in there to control that pest.

So the pesticide use has gone down bunches in our country, in corn and soybean country. Because we don't use them anymore!

To society I think that farmers offer a lot. They're independently owned. They're their own boss. I'm not sure how to answer that, except that farmers are just a huge part of this society, in these communities. Now Kansas City or Wichita, you know, they get overlooked. What do you think?

I think there's a lot of people that wish they could be more involved in raising their own food, having their flower gardens...farming to me is just a livelihood. I don't know how anybody could beat it, to be a farmer. You're your own boss, you're out there working with your animals, you know nobody's telling you what to do everyday! The young people that don't ever experience those thoughts even, or the joy of it, being out in the country, they're missing a lot.

Read the full interview here, and learn about the complex grain marketing system, government regulations, and a year in the life of a grain elevator.

Lyle Fischer, Full Interview:

I lived here all my life. My dad worked in construction and farmed a little bit, but he never made a real livelihood out of farming. Had cattle and some hogs...raised seven kids. Took a lot of food to feed seven kids. I went on to school for four years and got my bachelors degree in business administration; had a buddy that was going to go to Cargill to work, and I said, "yeah, that wouldn't be so bad, working in a farm-type atmosphere." So I went down to Humboldt, and talked to the manager down there, which is about 40 miles that way, and decided to go to work for a co-op. I felt like that would be a good job.

Cargill's huge. Feed, seed, animal science, they're a big corporations. Worked there a couple of years, and had a chance to come back home, and went to work here in 1976 as the assistant manager, getting the feed, the seed, all the supplies, worked the counter. We started spraying row crops back in '75, so we bought a sprayer pickup a couple of years later and I drove that in the summertime for awhile. Got to where that was taking to much time and I wasn't getting my stuff done in the office, so I quit doing that. 2001 I took over as general manager...nine years went by, and it doesn't seem like nine years! I don't know, I really don't have a good story to tell. It's just work!

Well, he [Larry Gleue] said that it was a really unique and good model, this co-op, in how it operates. How is that, what makes it unique?

How is that...well, I think it started back in the mid-'70's, not just because I came there, but because we started doing things in agronomy. We started spraying in '75, and we grew from one rig to two or three rigs, and today we have 3 row row crop machines, 2 fertilizer machines, and a couple floaters, and 5 or 6 full-time people that custom apply. It's just grown from that. I think the service and the work ethics that we had with that, our people willing to do it, to get it done, has formed a bond to where they know they can come to us and it'll get done. I'm not saying that others won't. Probably being a workaholic was our problem, we all work too much. And it still goes that way!

Do you know how many farms are part of the co-op now?

Well, in 1995, the LeRoy co-op bought out an independent at Gridley over here. We also bought a Westphalia independent, which is that way about 15 miles. We opened up our territory, so the customers we already had in those areas had a place to go for closer service. As far as the farm numbers, gosh, I don't know the count, but we have about 1200-1300 members. They're not all active; part of them are landowners who are members who don't even live here. You got a lot of landowners who have got their land from family over the years, somebody farms it for them, but they're members.

A lot of the farmers are farming 1500 to 2000 acres, corn, beans, some wheat. Wheat's kind of a rotation crop. Little bit of milo. Not much milo anymore.

Are you cropping too?

No. No I don't. I just run a few cattle. It's all grass. I don't have time for farming.

So, I'm from a dairy area, and I'm not very familiar with the way that row crops and elevators and everything work. So how does a co-op elevator like this work, compared to someone who might just have the option of a larger company owning the elevators around them?

Well, a cooperative is member-owned. In 1960, fifty years ago, the farmers wanted something better for them. Competition-wise, they wasn't getting a fair shake in the market. So they decided to start a cooperative and own it themselves. From that it's grown to the membership we have now. But a co-op is member-ownership; you earn your membership by doing business there, or you can buy membership. Any money that's made at the end of the year is shared back to the people that have done business that year. So all the assets, the income, is returned back to the members, based on their annual purchases, unlike an independent elevator or grain business, where it goes in their own pocket.

Since you get to work with all these different farmers in the 30-some years you've been involved, what are the biggest issues you've seen farmers around here dealing with?

In the late '70's and early '80's, it was the debt load. The debt and the interest. The interest was so high that we lost a few farmers that couldn't make it. They was paying 18% interest on a lot of money. That was the biggest challenge I can see in those times, the interest rate. Since we're dryland country, we don't have irrigation, we rely on mother nature's grace to give us rain and the right weather when you need it.

1980 was a tough year. It was a dry year. Very, very dry. That hurt too, back with the interest and the dry year, people didn't raise a crop. And not too many people had crop insurance then. So, that was probably a challenge as far as the '80's.

The '90's, I'd say, was the price of the commodity. It was so low. Except for a peak year, you might have a good price, but when corn was $2 and beans were $4.50, you know, the income that they had probably came more from the government payments than it did from their farm. They had to survive on some government payments, their LDPs, etc.

Today, the cost of inputs have risen so much. It takes a lot of money to put in a crop, but the commodity prices are better. I'm not sure they're making anymore money.

Is it the chemicals or the seeds, or both?

Not so much chemicals. The seed and the fertilizer. Machinery. Labor. Those are all things that really got pretty high. Chemicals actually, probably got cheaper. But the seed costs have risen to offset the chemical prices.

I'm also curious; I imagine it's no different here than it is everywhere else that we've been, that farms have gotten a lot bigger, which means that a lot of people have gotten out of farming. Do you think that people are getting bigger because they want to or because they have to to stay ahead?

I would say that most of them are getting bigger because they have to. Now, there's a few, I'm sure, that are getting bigger because of pride. You know, "I want to be bigger than the other guy." I could tell you a few of those. Most of them, I'd say, are getting bigger because they see the need to farm more acres to make their machinery pay. To me, I can't understand how they can put a quarter million dollars into a combine or $200,000 into a planter, and plant two or three thousand acres and make it work. I guess they have to. I spend $200,000 for a sprayer, but I can spray 30, 40,000 acres, generate a lot more income. Not necessarily profit, but a lot more income, cash flow, out of that machine. But when you run a quarter million dollar combine over 2,000 acres, I don't know, that's a lot of money per acre.

Do farmers involved with the co-op ever share machinery?

Family-wise they do. There is a couple parties that have a sprayer together. There's a few that don't own a combine. There's a couple older guys that don't own a combine. But as far as sharing tillage, planters, no. If they do, it's custom-hired, they pay the other guy to do it for them.

Has the co-op's life been pretty smooth? Has it had any issues; competition, pressure, from other parties?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, there's always competition. In the grain business especially, there's competition because the farmers will travel with their semis 40, 50, 100 miles. They don't have to go to their local elevator to market their grain. Unlike back in the '70's and '80's, when they had small trucks. They didn't have semis. Now all the farmers got semis, except for a handful, so they can truck it farther. So competition in grain is definitely there. Competition in seed is also there because you've got a lot of farmers selling seed. We probably have half a dozen seed dealers in our area. Fertilizer and chemicals isn't too bad because we're kind of sitting here in a zone, taking care of our own people; the other co-op down here about 20 miles, they take care of their people. So the crossover of agronomy doesn't affect us too much. 'Course in fuel there's always competition.

What would be some ideal changes, from your perspective, that you'd like to see in the larger ag system?

Well, the farmer gets a lot of aid from the government now, as far as government payments, conservation. There's really probably not much more they can get there. I'm looking for a challenge to the farmers...the government possible making them have to be accountable for all the phosphate and nitrogen that they put on the soil. That could be a huge regulatory issue if they try to control what the farmer does with fertility. If that happens, then we as an agronomy service will have to beef up our services for site-specific fertility. Which we're doing somewhat now, in 5-acre grids, soil sampling, putting together a soil fertility map and fertilizing based on those grids. We're doing a lot of it already, but we only got one person doing that. And right now it's all voluntary. I see that as probably the biggest challenge for the farmers. if the government tries to mandate how we fertilize.

You think that's likely to go through?

I think it will someday. Because the nitrogen in the drinking water and the phosphate in the lakes. We get those plumes...a lot of that's phosphate runoff, fertilizer runoff. But...filter strips that the farmers have put in around creeks and edges of fields will stop a lot of that movement of water from the fields to the streams.

That would be a challenge for us, is how are we going to pay for those people? To me that's going to be a real challenge. I'll probably be out of it by then! But we're still working towards it, doing a lot of grid sampling. We've done that now for 3, 4 years, and it's good! 'Cause now you're putting fertilizer on where you really need it, not just a broad coverage. So I like that idea to do it that way; I just hope the government doesn't mandate it.

Oh, issues for the elevator and the co-op go far beyond that. DOT regulatory issues, OSHA regulatory issues, EPA regulatory issues. Yeah, we all have to be safe, we all have to make sure we don have spills with chemicals, make sure we contain our fertilizer load pads, you know, it's all in place. But it seems to me like the regulatory people are trying to do more than whats necessary. Because of dollars. I think they have to find some dollars to keep their programs funded, and if they can find some penalty out here in the country, then they can charge a fine.

You know, one of the things last year is...it's gonna happen...have you ever been around a grain bin, trying to clean it out? Well, OSHA says we can not get into the bin with any moving parts. Well, when you get the grain run out of the bin through the holes, you got all this grain around the bottom; well, you have a sweep that brings it to the center and then it augers it out. Well, those sweeps don't run by themselves. You have to get in there and kind of manage it, keep it going, sweep up behind it, stuff like that. Well, OSHA says we cannot have anybody in the bin with any power on. So we can't go in the bin to clean it. It's like, "uhh...so, how we gonna do it?"

Is that regulation coming because there have been issues, or is it just overly cautionary?

Oh, they think that there's been some injuries because of it. And there has been. But most of them don't come from walking behind a sweep. Just things we gotta deal with, figuring out new ways to do things. So we buy a power sweep that has a tractor drive that pushes it. Those work, but it just costs money. We're gonna spend $30,000 to put in six sweeps that have tractor drives on them. So it's just...we'll deal with it somehow, but we're gonna spend money to do it, and it's not necessary.

And that money could go to the farmers?

That could go to bottomline profits, which goes to the farmers.

Can you walk me through how an elevator operates through the season? How does the elevator or co-op decide how much money the farmer gets and when the co-op sells off its store?

So, we have a fall harvest. Corn comes in, soybeans come in. We try to make 20-25 cents a bushel for a margin. So if we can sell them for $10, they're gonna get $9.75, for beans. That's the margin structure that we use. Grain comes in, we try to keep as much in our facility as we can until we have to ship it. Then, once we need to start shipping it, we find the market to take our soybeans. Most of the soybeans go to a processer in Emporia that processes the soybeans into meal and oil. Some of the beans go south to the port area near Tulsa, and it hits the barge and heads on down river to the Gulf; it's put on a ship and is taken to China or somewhere.

So the grain movement is from the farm to the elevator to the end user. That's the only market we have for soybeans, is a processor or an exporter.

And is that shipped by truck or do you have rail?

Mostly truck. We do some rail, but mostly truck.

Now, corn is a little different. The corn market is...you got the ethanol users, you got the livestock users, you got the food processing, and you got export. Well, most of our corn goes to the ethanol market, because there's an ethanol plant in Garnett, which is 30 miles to the east and north. Probably 10% of our fall harvest is put on rail, and most of the time that goes south and is probably going into the Arkansas poultry, or feedlot or dairy. Most of that's going to livestock feed.

About 10% of our corn goes to our own feed mill to process and feed livestock in our communities. Then, I don't know how much of our corn is actually exported, because, like I say, we only rail about 10% of it, and I don't think there's too much going to the Gulf for export.

We don't have a food processer in this community, within 100 miles that I know of. So the corn is brought in and we ship a lot during harvest, then we ship during the winter and spring and summer. The corn marketing is a little different than soybeans. We can usually hedge the corn. So we own it. We paid the farmer for it. And then we carry that until a future month. We can make up 10, 15, 20 cents a bushel by hedging and shipping later, using the board of trade market. We're not risking the price, we're just risking the basis. So we might buy some corn in the fall and not actually market or ship it until March, April, or May.

With soybeans, the price they are, $10, we really can't afford to hold them too long. 'Cause the interest on that will really kind of eat you up.

So, is it risky at all that you...you paid all the farmers, you now own the corn...then a couple months later you're thinking you're going to sell it, and then something strange happens, and the price just drops dramatically...is the elevator then going to lose quite a lot of money?

On a hedge, we're not risking the price. Okay, if we buy the corn at $3 and the Chicago board is, say, $3.50, that's a 50 cent basis. So, we buy the corn and we sell corn on the board, not the cash market. So a true hedge is: you buy the corn, and you sell to the board. So now the price change doesn't matter. If the price goes down to $1, well the board's going to go down, and so's your cash. Now, the risk you take is...remember I said 50 cents was the basis, the spread? The risk you take is, if the cash goes higher than the board. But during all of our years of marketing, we watch the basis, and if we see a basis that's really good, we sell it. If we see a basis that's going against us, we'll get out. We won't carry it to where we have a loss on the basis. But the price of the grain is immaterial to us. It means a lot to the farmer, because that's the price he's gonna get. But to us the price of the grain is not important.

A complex system.

It is. I've heard marketing people say, "buy high and sell cheap to make money." How can you do that? Well, you give the farmer $5 for his corn, and at that time the board is $5.50, you bought it high...the price goes down $3, you sell cheap. You still make your margin. 'Cause you covered yourself with the hedge. You've got two sides of the marketing...the farmer that wants to sell for a high price and the end user, the feeder or the ethanol plant that wants to buy cheap. Well, not everybody can have what they want.

I'm curious about the demographics of the farmers around here. Do you see many younger folks getting into farms? Kids taking over operations, or anybody new coming in?
We have several...and they're not young, but there's several in the 35 to 50 range. I mean, that's not young, but it's pretty young for...we have quite a few that's in their 50s and 60s. As far as under 30...there's a few. But they're all sons. They're sons that are coming back or staying. Yeah there's a few. I think we've got a good bunch of under-50 farmers. Under 50 means they still have 15, 20 years, 25 years of farming in 'em. Very very few of them retire at 65, you know. They think they do, but they're still farming when they're 70, 75.

The co-op has a retirement plan. When guys reach 69 they get their equities. Well, their equities was money they earned over the years from the profits of the co-op every year. We've got some farmers that have $15, $20, $30, $40, $50, $60 thousand dollars worth of equities. And what's interesting is, we pay those down to $1,000 when they reach that age, 68 or whatever it is. But those guys are still farming at 68, so now they start earning money again. There's some of these older farmers that have $20 or $30 thousand bucks back in their equities, just because they didn't quit farming at 68. They're still farming and earning dividends.

There's farmers that won't quit till they're buried. And there's a few of them that quit and they're done. Then all they do is hang out. There's a few farmers that don't have livestock, just rowcrop. To me, they have a lot of time to kill. To me, they don't farm full time, they work 4,5,6 months out of the year, and the rest of the time they're just hanging out. But the livestock guy, he's working livestock.

We saw a lot of pasture as we were coming in here...do most of the folks have a small or midsized herd?

Yeah. But there's a lot of the farmers that don't have livestock at all.

I'm curious about...it seems like there's been negative press about chemicals. What would you like those folks to know?

I think the word "chemical" sounds like a hazardous material. Maybe the word "chemicals" is the wrong word to use. "Herbicide" is a better terminology to use. Herbicide is used by our customers to control weeds. Then there's pesticides. Pesticides are more for pest control, insects. Gosh...how do you tell the consumer that these chemicals are not hazerdous to the food?

Herbicides are safe! They're out there to control weeds. The plant that grows, like the corn or soybean, is tolerant to those herbicides, so it doesn't bother that grain that's growing. I don't know.

Do you think what the farmers do out here is appreciated by the consumer?

The consumer in which community? I don't know if the consumer actually knows what it takes to raise a crop, to make the bread on his table and the eggs in his frying pan, I don't know if they do or not. Sometimes you wonder. I think...to me, the naturalist or whoever that thinks that we can feed the world on the way it was 50 years ago, is going to go hungry. We can't feed the world on 50-bushel {per acre} corn, 20-bushel beans. We have to have genetics, we have to have fertilizer, we have to have herbicides...we have to have those traits in these crops to make higher yields.

The GMO is the traits that they put in the plant so that the plant is resistant to the corn borer. Well, think about that. The corn borer, the corn root worm is being controlled genetically in the plant instead of using a pesticide. So the use of a true pesticide, the organophosphates that we used to use to control corn rootworms, we don't use them anymore. We don't have to! Because the plant itself has got the gene in there to control that pest.

So the pesticide use has gone down bunches in our country, in corn and soybean country. Because we don't use them anymore!

What was your question? I forget!

If consumers appreciate this type of agriculture.

I doubt it. I doubt it. Do you?

Like I said, I'm from the Oregon coast, and it's all dairy around me, mostly small-scale dairy. And so, I didn't until...of course you can't really understand until you're totally around it. I'm always curious how to better communicate how agriculture works to people in the cities and even to people in other types of agriculture. That's really why we're doing this.

I don't know. Commentators...TV commentators, that's the one's you need to make sure understand agriculture. People watch TV and they hear a lot of stuff. I don't think radio as much as TV. I was on the road, traveling this week and happened to find a farm report in, I think, Oklahoma. They had a really good program on the appreciation of the farmer, and what he does to raise crop. That's what people need to hear, but how many people listen to that stuff? They're gonna put their earphones in, and iTunes...kids aren't listening to the radio.

Food's safe. I feel that food is safe. But you hear about the kids that are getting obese and the health issues we're going to have in the years to come...it's not because of the food they're eating, it's because of the foods they're buying. It's the processed foods, all the pops they drink, the snacks they eat, no exercise. But our food is safe. Personally I don't like buying a lot of processed foods, but we do. But I don't know how to tell the consumer our food is safe. Maybe the internet. But it only takes one TV commentator that has millions of followers to really ruin one good day! Mad Cow disease, you know, that started a lot of concerns years ago.

One of the big questions that we ask all the farmers is, what do you think that the role of the farmer in society should be?

Hm. Well, he's a contributer to our economy. In society we all hope to contribute to our economy. I think the role of the farmer is probably involved more in community activities than some of the people just working a job. What I see is a lot more giving, of their time, of their moneys, to the communities. At least, in our church, our farmers are big givers, big supporters. I think the farmers probably support the churches more than other groups of communities; maybe that's just what I see.

To society I think that farmers offer a lot. They're independently owned. They're their own boss. I'm not sure how to answer that, except that farmers are just a hige part of this society, in these communities. Now Kansas City or Wichita, you know, they get overlooked. What do you think?

I think there's a lot of people that wish they could be more involved in raising their own food, having their flower gardens...farming to me is just a livelihood. I don't know how anybody could beat it, to be a farmer. You're your own boss, you're out there working with your animals, you know nobody's telling you what to do everyday! The young people that don't ever experience those thoughts even, or the joy of it, being out in the country, they're missing a lot.

National Ag Day promotional video.

2011-02-10T11:27:00.001-05:00

Hello folks! Today I want to depart from the interviews for just a moment and show a video. It's like those wonderful days in school, when the teacher didn't get the lesson plan together in time and you get to just watch. I encourage you to take 5 minutes to watch this one, promoting National Ag Day, in March, on the first day of spring. For two reasons:

1) I like thinking that spring is almost here. My seed catalogs have all arrived, and I'm eagerly waiting for the ground to thaw;

2) The video does a nice job providing images and quotes that, I believe, reflect the diversity of agriculturalists in this country. The attitude that I've generally felt amongst farmers and ranchers is not one of secrecy, but one of transparency. It's increasingly obvious that consumers want to know details about their food production. Supermarkets are all starting to put up signs featuring their growers, and government funding is coming down the line for increased food education in schools.

I would love to hear your comments, and your arguments. Yes, there are a number of discrepancies in the industry, from labeling issues to complex safety standards. It's a complex system, and I hope to be a part of the discussion.

Are there people whose opinions or views you'd like to hear? We will do our best to seek them out and interview them, so ask your questions. Enjoy the video!

--Trav--

Richvale, California: Dennis Lindberg, 86. Rice farmer.

2011-02-05T20:41:00.002-05:00

Well, I was born here in 1924. On July 23rd, 1924. When I was a senior in high school I grew my first rice crop as an FFA project. I bypassed college and all and went to the School of Hard Knocks or whatever you want to call it.

This year I planted my 69th consecutive rice crop. Somebody asked me when I hit 50, "well aren't you gonna retire?" And I said, "Hell no!" I've been very fortunate in those years.

In the spirit of welcoming the unexpected, let us leave the midwest in the sweltering last days of July and fast forward through a few states to an interview that took place in Richvale, California.

Richvale is nestled north of the fertile fruit and vegetable valleys that supply many of us non-Californians with carrots and lettuce in the winter months. The first farmers to inhabit Richvale tried to persuade wheat to grow here, but the climate and terrain were unsuitable for that crop. It wasn't until Dennis Lindberg's father started farming the land around 1911 that he and his peers realized this land was perfect for growing rice.

I have a great respect for my father and other people who settled this community in the years beginning '11, '12, and '13. We just celebrated our 100th anniversary of the founding of Richvale. They came here to what was primarily wheat land. And not very good wheat land at that. There was some farms established that'd been abandoned. Well, then a group out of the San Joaqine Valley Realty Firm came up here and formed what the called the Richvale Land Colony and they started promoting, selling this land.

This was as early as '09 and '10, if you will. Rice was just in its infancy in California at that time. The first rice was grown in probably '09 or '10 on an experimental basis down and out west of Gridley from what I understand. Then, of course, as things went on, by 1915 the land developers were gone. They grabbed their money and left, if you will.

So it was left to our founders to get an irrigation system. It didn't have proper drainage; there were a few wheat farmers out here, and when they were farming rice it would leak out onto their wheat, and of course they didn't like that. And there were no improved roads. So our founders went through a living Hell, if you will, till they got something established and founded this [BUCRA]. This facility was founded in 1915. My father was one of the founding members and on the original board of directors.

So, I feel a great debt of gratitude in those of us of second and third generation to our forebearers, forefathers, who founded this community and provided a place for us to do something with our lives.

Dennis, or "Denny", as he is known in his community, exudes excitement, an abundance of civic pride, and a passion for growing rice. As a hobby he also grows watermelons of generous proportions. He and his son, Gary Lindberg, farm about 400 acres of rice in this region of around 500,000 acres. We were connected to him, for all intents and purposes the local historian, by Jim Morris at the California Rice Commission.

The Butte County Rice Growers Association (BUCRA) building where we met Dennis also contained evidence of his artistic abilities; the front waiting area had one of his hand-fashioned metal duck sculptures featured. He creates these metal ducks with different themes (the Fire Department Duck and the Evangelist Duck, for example) and sells them as fundraisers for the town of Richvale.

It's a city without a real city government, if you will. They call me kind of the ipso facto mayor around here. I don't live here anymore; my son lives on the farm. We live over in Thermalito.

Richvale had been a boom town that could have been on its way to busting in the early 1900's, but its citizens wouldn't hear of it. When the economy started tanking back then, and the townsfolk were abandoned by the developers, this hamlet rolled up its collective sleeves and started planting rice and helping each other get through. There is a definite Bedford Falls feel here and Dennis could easily play the role of George Bailey, town enthusiast and champion. The fire department, a local cafe, and schools are operated and maintained in a large part through donations and volunteer power from the community. Dennis describes his town as a "self-help community."

When asked what he'd like to see change in agriculture, he spoke, among other things, of the need to remind people that this rural Californian community exists out here, producing an incredibly important food crop. He references Lundberg Rice, a neighbor who specialized in organic growing (no relation, by the way, between the Lindbergs and the Lundbergs. Both families were early settlers here):

Public acceptance that we're out here. And we want to remain here! We got to keep this commerce going. You know, out at Lundbergs, there's 250 employees in that facility over there. Right here at Butte County we must have 50! We got an irrigation district with 12 employees, we got a drainage district with 4 or 5, we got a school...you gotta keep those things going. And rice is what's doing that in this case. I want to see that continue.

Like some of the other farmers we've talked to, Dennis relates how much technology and equipment has been improved over the last decades. He is working on his 69th rice crop this year and he grows a short-statured variety.

When the Lindbergs got their first harvester it could harvest in a day what a brand new harvester could do in an hour today. Denny used to let his fields lay fallow every other year but demand has become so great for rice that he plants every year now. Water rights are an issue we heard many farmers express concern about, but Richvale has impenetrable water rights that keeps the ever growing population of southern California off their backs.

I saw this industry...I consider it a privilege...I'm 86 years old by the way...I got to see horses working in the field as a kid. I've seen this industry come from the horses and the hundred-pound sacks to stationary harvesters. I even pulled the bundle wagons if you know what they are. They put the rice in shocks about so big around, and you went around with a bundle wagon, pull it with a tractor. When I was 13 years old, pulling that bundle wagon out and over to the harvester, where you unhooked and went and got another bundle wagon.

In those days they hired transient workers, hobos if you will. They were coming out of Oregon and Washington up there in the grain harvest. They'd hit here about October. Well, come Saturday night or if it rained, you paid 'em off you didn't always see 'em again! {laughs} So my dad had to get me out there one bad winter in 1937 when I was 13. So I got exposed to some of that and I begged to continue. I though, "boy, this is cool, man!" Not that I didn't enjoy school. I was a good student; I was a straight A student my first two years, but then I got more interested in farming than I did school.

Lundberg Rice, also based in Richvale, is the leading grower of organic rice in the country; Dennis mentions that they "put this town on the world map".

Dennis estimated that 60% of the rice grown here is sold domestically, and 40% is exported.

Like most farming communities, time is made and set aside for recreation, especially if it involves agriculture. Before we hit the road, Dennis drove us out to his rice paddies and just beyond, where he has his watermelon patch. Every year he grows 4 or 5 gargantuan melons to be used in a weight-guessing competition; whoever is closest to the actual weight takes the melon home. Travis and I were sworn to secrecy (melons have been stolen in the past) about the location of the patch, and Dennis took us to a seemingly overgrown portion of his field. After furtively glancing around to make sure no one was watching, he surreptitiously bent down and pulled back a layer of grass to expose the promising green-striped shell of a watermelon already the size of a mini-refrigerator. As quickly as it had been uncovered it was inconspicuously tucked back into its hay bedding and Dennis straightened up and had us renew our vows to keep mum about the location of the watermelon.

As a parting gift he gave us two lesser melons and the sparkling wisdom of a man who has seen his fair share of harvests- "when you cut 'em open they should go 'snick!'- that's how you know you've got a good one!"

A few weeks ago, Dennis wrote to us again to update us on the aforementioned watermelon. Below is the 90 pound monster. Dennis' son, Gary (right) and Donald Rystrom (left) each guessed within a pound of that.

Read the full interview after the jump, including stories of growing up in rice country and facts and opinions about the industry...

Well, I was born here in 1924. On July 23rd, 1924. When I was a senior in high school I grew my first rice crop as an FFA project...Future Farmers of America...and I bypassed college and all and went to the School of Hard Knocks or whatever you want to call it. This year I planted my 69th consecutive rice crop.

Somebody asked me when I hit 50, "well aren't you gonna retire?" And I said, "Hell no!" I've been very fortunate in those years.

You know, it's not like...well, if I sound braggadocio, I want to tell you why. I have a great respect for my father and other people who settled this community in the years beginning '11, '12, and '13. We just celebrated our 100th anniversary of the founding of Richvale. They came here to what was primarily wheat land. And not very good wheat land at that. There was some farms established that'd been abandoned. Well, then a group out of the San Joaqine Valley Realty Firm came up here and formed what the called the Richvale Land Colony and they started promoting, selling this land.

This was as early as '09 and '10, if you will.   Rice was just in its infancy in California at that time. The first rice was grown in probably '09 or '10 on an experimental basis down and out west from what I understand. Then, of course, as things went on, by 1915 the land developers were gone. They grabbed their money and left, if you will. So it was left to our founders to get an irrigation system. It didn't have proper drainage; there were a few wheat farmers out here and when they were farming rice it would leak out onto their wheat, and of course they didn't like that. And there were no improved roads. So our founders went through a living Hell, if you will, till they got something established and founded this. This facility was founded in 1915. My father was one of the founding members and on the original board of directors.

So, I feel a great debt of gratitude in those of us of second and third generation to our forebearers, forefathers, who founded this community and provided a place for us to do something with our lives.

Well, and I might say that I saw this industry...I consider it a privilege...I'm 86 years old by the way...I got to see horses working in the field as a kid. I've seen this industry come from the horses and the hundred-pound sacks to stationary harvesters. I even pulled the bundle wagons if you know what they are. They put the rice in shocks about so big around, and you went around with a bundle wagon, pull it with a tractor. When I was 13 years old, pulling that bundle wagon out and over to the harvester, where you unhooked and went and got another bundle wagon.

In those days they hired transient workers, hobos if you will. They were coming out of Oregon and Washington up there in the grain harvest. They'd hit here about October. Well, come Saturday night or if it rained, you paid 'em off you didn't always see 'em again! {laughs} So my dad had to get me out there one bad winter in 1937 when I was 13. So I got exposed to some of that and I begged to continue. I though, "boy, this is cool, man!" Not that I didn't enjoy school. I was a good student; I was a straight A student my first two years, but then I got more interested in farming than I did school.

Has there ever been a point when you wanted to go do something else?

I had visions and dreams as a kid growing up, yeah. I was a pretty darn good trumpet player, by the way. And in between I played the Saturday night dance jobs in a little four-piece. I played first chair trumpet all the way through high school. That was one of the real reasons I stayed in high school, because I loved that music. And I played a little football and those kind of things and baseball.

I got married in 1945. So last April 8 my wife and I celebrated our 65th wedding anniversary. I have a son and a daughter, couldn't ask for a better family. My son now farms with me, my daughter lives in San Francisco with her husband and they're successful in their own right. As a matter of fact, her husband is the president of the National Ferrari Club.

So how many ares are you farming now?

Well, my son and I this year, we planted 400 acres total. We leased out part of it to another party, so in our land holding we have right at 600 acres. I started with 50 acres that I inherited from my father. I rented land till he gave that to me, and then I built on top of that, where we now own in the family and farm around 500 acres and lease another 100.

How many hands does it take to manage that much?

Well, we have an arrangement with another farmer. A rice farmer, plus he's a row crop farmer. He has enough employees that he has to have for the row crops that he provides...we have our own harvester and two tractors. We have one year round employee, but during harvest we're able to borrow a couple of his employees. Plus we rent him one piece of our land which helps, you know? He has a tractor that hauls our rice for us, so we don't have to worry about that side of it. We have a pretty close-knit, smooth operation thanks to my son who is really...I'm kind of backing out of it now; I don't drive tractor much anymore, or the harvester but I used to do it all of course.

Our headquarters is just east of town here, just a quarter of a mile. And all of our land is pretty well local, we don't have to run all over the country to farm it.

Obviously rice has very large differences from other crops, with the flooding and everything. Can you give me an overview of how a year on the rice patty works?

In the spring, after the rains stop we like to get started, preferably in the middle of April or late, late March. We start the ground preparation. We prefer to plant in the last week of April, first week of May. Then you escape all the late rains that come later in October. The varieties that we have now are so much better than the ones I started with that were 165-day maturity. Those crops ran clear into October, November. Now by the middle of October we're pretty well done.

We voted on ourselves in 1969 what was called an accelerated rice research program, where we asked plant breeders to bring us a crop, a short-stature variety...you know, you get 'em tall, and a lot of ripe kernels on 'em and they fall over and then you kind of defeated your purpose...so they developed some short-stature varieties beginning in '69. That program...the rice industry, by the way, owns the rice research station just 2 miles down the road, so we call the shots on the rice breeding program. Since 1969 we've moved the state average from about 50 hundredweight to last year it was around 85, or something to that amount. BUCRA, this facility right here, hit 94 hundredweight per acre. I think some of the best rice in the world is right here. And it's substantiated by the yields that we get. There's a few areas, in Arkansas...by the way, 2 million acres of rice is grown there as compared to 500-600,000 here in California.

I've got a couple of charts I could show you, rice yield as it progressed over the years. It might be interesting.

Is water a problem at all?

Only in severe drought years. Then we do have deep wells that we can turn on. We don't like to do that 'cause then you start foolin' around with the underground supply of water and that can cause subsidence and you can defeat your purpose. We fortunately have a riparian water right, established in 1913, that is impenetrable, or else Southern California would have had that water a long time ago. To our good fortune, except in a drought year have ample water for our crops. We'll supplement with ground water if we have to, but I've only had to do that two times in the years that I've been growing rice so we hope that...who knows! Whether there's global warming...

What about soil preparation? You want more compacted soil for rice, correct?

Ah, well, we like to get it worked up and mellow in the spring for what we call a seed bed. Then we inject the fertilizer down about so deep; we call that the finish fertilizer, we got some on top for it to start. We do sometimes detect that there's going to be a need for more fertilizer, then we do what we call a top dress with an airplane and that'll be absorbed by the plant. I didn't do any of that this year because we planted a little bit late. You can also cause it to grow itself out so that you don't get a crop. You can over-fertilize it, it'll fall down. been through some of those too.

Do you rotate rice ground with other row crops?

We used to, we used to.   When I first started here you never thought of rice after rice after rice. You'd plant it one year and then leave it idle and then rotate back and forth. But the demand for rice and the industry now, we just about farm it every year now.

So what are the biggest challenges in ag that you've had to deal with over the years?

Well...weather, for one. And getting on the ground early in the spring and getting planted. Some of the early-maturing varieties have been planted and grown successfully up into even the first part of June, but you're kind of asking for it if you plant it that late. It could suddenly turn cold, which it did this year, and some of that rice planted late may be in trouble, I don't want to be a doomsday person here but mine was planted ahead of that, I'll put it that way. Then come harvest, we usually start about the middle of September, but this year's gonna be the end of September and it'll take us about 30 days, we just have one harvester.

Another comparison is that, the first harvester I ever had, a push harvester, self-propelled...this is after we went from the bundle wagons and hundred-pound bags to bulk, if you will. I feel privileged to have witnessed all that, worked with that. So, the first harvester, self-propelled, that I had, I was lucky if I could get 600 hundredweight, that's 6000 pounds, in a day. Our current harvester does that in about 45 minutes. So quite a difference.

Is there anything that you miss or reminisce about from that old style of rice farming?

Childhood memories, you want to know here?   Okay...well, there was what they called a hobo camp. Hobo workers would camp right out here behind where those flats are. A hobo jungle, if you will. And they had little temporary shelters put up. Across the street over there, believe it or not, was a grape vineyard. I remember going over there with my father and they'd be sitting around a fire, maybe have a pole sticking up, a wire, and a tin can, cooking something. He'd hire crew out of there. He had some that came every year...but like I said, if it rains you had to go and hire some new ones. So I remember going with him down to do that. My dad arranged a bunkhouse where they could sleep and a cookhouse where they fed them. I would get to go out there and eat supper with those guys. I was just a kid. But then I became a part of the crew finally when I was 13, you see?

Anyway, it would have been right at the beginning of World War II, '42, '43, along in there, when they started making a transition over to the combine. They'd phase out of the stationary harvester into the combines. 'Course I ran several of those over the years. I would stay out of school my junior and senior year around harvest time. But I learned out there, see? I don't regret it a bit. I never dreamed I'd see a facility like that across the street in this little town of Richvale. But you know, they're smart...get it out where the farm is! Not in the big city! There were three of those at one time. One in Gridley, one in Chico, and one in Yuba City.

So, I don't know, I'm just ranting on and on here. I don't know how much good you're getting out of this except...I do want to say this about this community. I'm proud I was born here, right over there in Broadway. The house still stands there. I had a brother and two sisters. My sisters inherited that house and they later sold it. I call this a "self-help community," in that they came here and they were abandoned by their developers, so they had to do it themselves, improve the roads, get the irrigation system and drainage system...get a school goin', get the church, there were two grocery stores at one time but we don't have any now. We have a little cafe down around the corner, which is owned by the community by the way. They made their own sewer, got our own volunteer fire department over there, there's a good strong Evangelical Church here, there's the Richvale Parents Association, we formed our own recreation district...so it's a city without a real city government, if you will. They call me kind of the ipso facto mayor around here. I don't live here anymore; my son lives on the farm. We live over in Thermolito.

Well, we need to stay on the rice. I told you how proud I am of the accelerated rice research program and how lucky we are to have this facility here. We don't market rice out of here, it goes out to several different marketers. Plus there's the Lundberg facility here, they have, with their organics, they have put this own on the world map. You know, you go into a supermarket and you see their products eye level. That stuff's moving if you see it on eye level. They've done a marvelous job, they have, with their organic production.

Is that on the rise?

Well, I've heard rumors that there might be a surplus, I don't know, you hear. I encourage them and I tell you why. If they can find a market for that rice, that's that many acres out of production competing with me over in the medium grain.

So, obviously they have their own brand name that they market under...where does the rest of this rice go? Is it domestic?

Yeah, the last figure I heard was we're about 60% domestic and 40% export. That could be different now, but I think that's where it is. And there's various mills. I market with Associated Rice Marketing Co Op, which does not sell, but it deals with these millers out here. We have our own pool of rice and it has produced a pretty good return every year that is commissioned.

I'm sure that you've see change over the years in the varieties that are grown. Are there a number of different varieties here or everyone growing the same thing?

Yeah, they're all kind of numbered now. They used to be like "CalLady" and those kind of names, but now they're more numbers...M202, M204, M206, M208, right down the line. M401...M401 is a carryover. It's a 165-day return and you've got to plant that early. It has a very wonderful milling quality and it commands a little premium price, but it doesn't yield up with the other varieties that we have.

And do most of those get processed into white rice or are they sold as brown rice?

Some of it is sold brown rice, but they just knock the hull off . The real good is in than bran, you know, but people prefer the white. Most of the rice we grow is polished into white rice.

In a larger picture, what wold be some ideal changes you'd like to see in the ag system in this country?

Well. We're headed there, I think...you know, the greatest criticism we have is the subsidy program. My first crop I got $3.50 a hundredweight. A postage stamp was 3 cents. Now where do you think it is now? After the depression era of '29, '30, '31, congress put into play the so-called farm program. The largest part of that is the school lunch program. But corn, wheat, grains, cotton, peanuts, and rice...here's the way it works in rice: At harvest time you can go over to the local Farm Service Agency and get a loan for $6 a hundredweight. They will forward you that money. Then you have until August the following year to find a market for that. Six dollars, that isn't even break-even anymore. Used to be, way back when. So, you got almost a year now to find a market...that's when we put our marketing agencies in. In my case, ARMCo, Associated Rice Marketing. They find a better market, and we go and redeem that, we go and buy that back, and get a sale, and go "hip, hip, hooray! Made a little money!" So we're criticized for that, but you know, that is put into place to keep an adequate food supply going through the infrastructure that our people enjoy the greatest food bargain. When you talk about expendable income they have the best bargain on earth.

Public acceptance that we're out here. And we want to remain here! We got to keep this commerce going. You know, out at Lundbergs, there's 130 employees in that facility over there. Right here at Butte County we must have 50! We got an irrigation district with 12 employees, we got a drainage district with 4 or 5, we got a school...you gotta keep those things going. And rice is what's doing that in this case. I want to see that continue.

Before you leave I'm gonna show you my watermelon patch. You can pick your own if you like. I got a monster out there. I'm afraid to show it to you. A friend of mine gave me a packet of seeds, they're called "Carolina Cross". They claim it will go to 200 pounds. Biggest one I ever raised was 50 pounds. He gave me this packet of seeds; he got it at Wal-Mart of all places and there were 7 seeds in it. I put 3 in one hill and just 1 in another hill. I kept the rest of the 3 for next year maybe.

Do you know, before they got about half-grown they were already pretty big. Somebody went out there and stole three of them. So I immediately picked one and put in the cool box at the cafe. I run what's called a Booster Club; we meet once a month and have breakfast. About 12, 15 people pay $100 a year to make sure the cafe keeps going. We pay the county taxes, the insurance, and electricity out of that fund. Well, I do this every year...whoever gets closest to the weight of it gets to take it home! And I don't know if they're gonna want to take this one home, 'cause...well, I'll show it to ya if you promise me you won't tell anybody to go get it.

You know, you cut 'em open and they go "snick!!" That's a good watermelon.

Update: Harry Young, one of our interviewees passed away this week.

2011-02-03T12:49:00.000-05:00

Harry Young, one of the farmers interviewed for this project, passed away this week in Kentucky. Our previous write-up of the interview is here.

Harry was a fascinating fellow, 83 years old, with a unique situation. He has been fighting to get his land and honor back after he was forced off of his lifelong farm and it was auctioned off. Much of our discussion was about the hardship of being a small farmer, his frustration that this could happen over what he says is a financial misunderstanding, and about the racism that he felt in the area.

An author and friend of his, Monica Davis, provided the following readings associated with his life and struggles. It's worth a read, especially for people such as myself who were raised in a very different region:

82-year-old Black farmer arrested, charged with making terrorist threats, May 17, 2009.

Black farmer files lawsuit to regain farm with $750000000 in coal deposits.

Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America, a book by Monica Davis.

And, a summary of our visit with Harry for the Stewards Project.

St. Louis Missouri: Stephen Inman, New Roots Urban Farm

2011-01-22T09:39:00.004-05:00

It was a sultry, humid evening in St. Louis when we arrived at the urban farm project maintained by Stephen and a core group of a few other volunteers. The farm is planted on a postage stamp lot and has a greenhouse, chicken coop, and picnic table toward the rear.

"I'm more prone to calling it a garden this year. Before it was like, "don't call it a garden! It's a farm!"

We sat at the picnic table and watched the sun set on the abundant crops while Stephen told us about the challenges and perks of being an urban farmer. This garden has been functioning for about seven years and Stephen told us the story of the four individuals who got New Roots going. Everybody is a volunteer and they have initiated or helped with several other food and social justice projects in St. Louis. The produce that is harvested supplies an impressive number of CSA boxes for its size and it barely pays for the next season of the garden's existence.

It is difficult to operate not knowing if the yield will bring in enough money for another season of planting and harvesting, but that is the reality of most farms, rural or urban. One of Stephen's goals is to have this garden produce enough to pay for a gardener who will lead the project and volunteers, since that position doesn't exist right now and the garden is run on hopeful volunteer labor and luck. The volunteers do get to walk away with some of the food, but the whole project started when the founders realized that they couldn't afford their own produce on their rural farm outside the city. A garden that won't sustain the folks who work it seems doomed to failure, or, at the very least, ironic.

Despite the typical volunteer and practical urban issues, the kale is looking lovely, and as we sit chatting with Stephen a few neighborhood folks wander in to check on the crops and do some harvesting, thankful for this abundant gift of food amidst the hustle and bustle of the city. We watch the sun set and the city sky turn purple over the distant skyscrapers and abandoned brick neighborhood buildings...

Click here for Stephen's story in his own words...

We've had several sites that other organizations have taken over. But this will always be ours. This will always be ours.

I did not grow up being very food-conscious. Not uncommon for an American male growing up in the suburbs in this time period. I didn't grow up with any sense of food mattering. I'm from St. Charles, which is a suburb of here, maybe 20 miles west of St. Louis, and that's where I spent the first 18 years of my life...not thinking about food.

I was thinking about other things; I had the very good fortune to get a guitar when I was 12 years old and decided I had, you know, found my key to the world. I was like, "This is it! It doesn't have to be the oppressive culture that I was raised in. I don't have to...there are other options for me out there." I started playing in a band, got into punk rock, and surrounded myself with other peers who were unsatisfied with their rearing and bands that had really good ideas, critical of the culture, and just participating in something like a folk tradition like punk rock music.

You start to learn what it's like to make a world on your own criteria and of your own design and you go to a show and it's a bunch of kids who booked it, set it up, and started the band and found the venue, ran the door, and we just had the best time ever, you know? It was like, "clearly this is what I'm going to be doing in some capacity", something based on community, not just accepting what was given to us, but really looking at all the motivations for the choices we make at every level that I could wrap my head around at the time.

So, after high school, I moved into an independent concert venue of sorts, called the Lemp Art Center on the south side. That was a pretty natural extension of the direction that my life was going, just running a venue and making independent, noncommercial music accessible and regarding it as art. Especially always understanding the bridge between art and social change. That was something that I was really into, again, another extension of playing some kind of radical music, I guess.

For a long time I had my mind around the issues...you know...any of the issues that face us; understanding the motivation of, like, capitalism and the different distresses that people accumulate over their lives that encourage capitalism and all the heavy handed ways of that. That tragedy is always playing out in regards to economics and politics and all those things, and also the ways that we can and can't enjoy our lives because of the culture we live in. So...that's all a long way of saying...I guess I was prone to something like this.

You know, I was vegan, because I listened to propaghandi, because of the idea that killing animals didn't seem right, that really jived with me. When I was growing up I ate, like Boca Burgers and things like that, when they were first coming out; but really my sense wasn't about care for my body or care for my food. I hadn't really understood that part of the oppression is keeping us so out of touch with our food that we don't keep ourselves healthy, you know? Because healthy people are dangerous. A lot of it also has to do with understanding our own worth, taking care of ourselves, taking care of our planet, understanding that we're here to make a significant impact.

I found out about this place [New Roots Urban Farm] because...well, just a bunch of circumstances. My partner at the time, she was working at a small gardening business of sorts with Joseph Black, who, with three other people, started this farm. She was working with Joseph and we became shareholders for the CSA and I started volunteering here. I saw how magical it was. And then just realized that it was more in line with what I wanted to be doing.

It was very symbolic of...like, I'm sure that in a band I wrote a song about feeding people, you know what I mean? But this was like, "Oh! Why don't I just go feed people!" It was seeing this place as, oh, these aren't just a bunch of ideas, like in art, it's like...a different kind of art, you know? It's still composition in lots of ways. I don't know why my mind is going this way because I don't actually come here and think of it as an art, but it is, you know? The management of any kind of organization is, and of course the growing of the food, and thinking of all the components of the community as a whole and what they need. I guess that's how my mind is kind of geared to this stuff.

So, New Roots was started...what year was it?...this is our 7th season, so '04...by Trish Grim, Joseph Black, Amy Girth, and Molly Dupre. They had various backgrounds in agriculture. They came it from their own place, just like I came to it. They were all working at a rural farm in Eureka, Missouri and were growing food for high-end farmers markets and restaurants, participating in that, enjoying the outdoors, and getting their hands dirty, cultivating the earth, but realizing that they caouldn't even afford the food that they're growing. And that so many people in the world...there's a lot of people who don't have access to that food. So they set out with that mind; they thought, what better way to address this issue than to go where there's the most food insecurity and start a farm? Like, let's just get down to business and handle it, and see what happens.

At this point we see this as urban homesteading essentially. We have gardens and chickens, composting toilets. We share resources and live as simply and sustainably as we can muster. That gives you a sense of why we'd end up here. This land was...I wish I knew more of the story of who actually owned it, but it was some nonprofit or cooperative or corporation or something owned it who were friends of ours who just didn't want to see it get developed.

So was this vacant and empty, or was there a structure here?

Probably in the late '80's it was all razed. There were 4 buildings, and where the grass is right here was the alley. If you look you can see the bricks still. And then this structure was here; I don't know what that was, some kind of dumpster or something. That was here. Telephone pole was here. That ailanthus tree was there. Maybe there was another tree or two, but you can look at our website and see the previous things; pretty cool. So they bought this land for something like $7,000 with money that they just borrowed from friends and family, and started the CSA. I think the first year was like an 8-person CSA.

So that's how it started; just these four people found this land in this community because of what was going on here. They brought in all the soil of course, you know, it's all toxic city soil here. We're always amending the soil. We make our own compost, we pick up food scraps, we get horse manure, we...actually that big pile of compost that you see out there is part of a really convenient setup right now where the city...the city composter is broken so they are contracting out an actual company that makes good compost. We're in this window of opportunity where we can be getting city compost for free. So we always are amending the soil and we're always bringing in these damn woodchips, this constant thing. We're considering other things, like maybe a living mulch, cover cropping.

Our yields get better and better every year. We're always testing our soil for heavy metals and things like that and we've never had any issues with it.

So some projects that New Roots has done since starting in the mid-auts...there's the CSA which at times has been as many as 22 families, shareholders who come twice a week and pick up their stuff. We do that from March through the end of October. We did a project called City Seeds, partnering with Gateway Greening and the St. Patrick Center where clients from St. Patrick Center, which is like a really smart, good rehabilitation, homeless shelter of sorts with really good people running it and really good heads on their shoulders. We would get clients from there. Then we helped start another site called City Seeds, which I feel like is like 2 and a half acres. It's not all gorwing but there's quite a bit of food growing there on this 2 and a half acre plot that they got; clients from the St. Patrick Center would get paid, like minimum wage to work there.
...

It gets down to what should the role of the average person be? What should the role of organizations like this be? What should the role of the government be? With addressing food issues...I'm not a social worker, you know, I'm not a politician, so I haven't familiarized myself with a lot of the steps that people take in those directions. I think I saw this place and thought, "well, I don't know what I'm going to do about the agricultural system in America, but this if food that's going to go to someone who wouldn't have access to it otherwise." I can define that.

You mentioned some roles that people play...what do you think the role of the farmer in our society should be?

The role of the farmer...things that come to mind...like, having a love, a real love for the land around you, real care, real stewardship of the land. That should be the role of the farmer, but then also there should be a system in place that allows that, or even encourages that. But currently a farmer isn't encouraged or even allowed to feel that kind of love for her farm. It's just a rat race of keeping up...trying to, like, get a subsidy, you know what I mean?

The word "culture", like "agri-culture"...I go back and forth between thinking, "was agriculture a good idea for humans?" I don't know; it kind of got us into this mess, this whole civilized mess that we're in, but I would like to think that it's possible for humans to organize themselves and their environment in a way that leaves the earth better than when we showed up. And I think that's possible. So of course, when I think of agriculture I'm leaning more towards, like, permaculture, you know? Farmers being encouraged and invited to consider ways to grow food intentionally in the sense that it can be there, like "perma-", permanent, sustainable, you know? To have something there for future generations to be like, "Thanks!" instead of like, "Thanks a lot for getting us into this," you know?

Farmers, they should definitely be the stewards of the land, but also deserve nothing but love and respect from their society as a whole. It needs to be one of the highest, most praised positions in human culture, the farmer. Two percent of Americans are farmers now; it should be something that most of us are participating in to some degree.

Council Grove, Kansas: Don and Doris Cress

2011-01-13T09:42:00.006-05:00

On a hot Sunday morning, after sleeping at the Canning Creek Cove campground in Kansas, we pulled into the small town of Council Grove. The town, located roughly between Salina and Topeka, is historically significant for being a key stop on the Santa Fe Trail. As such, we were not surprised to find ourselves having breakfast at The Santa Fe Cafe, eating a remarkable breakfast burrito.

The Santa Fe Cafe had just changed hands and a family of four was there to greet us and take our order. Our waitress looked to be about 9 years old and when we ordered 2 breakfast burritos she scrunched her forehead in thought and put her pencil to the order pad and scratched out "2 brayfast blotos" then happily skipped back to the kitchen where her dad was waiting and whispered loudly "Two breakfast burritos dad. But I didn't know how to spell that."

The burritos, or blotos as we now call them, arrived and they could have fed an army with as much eggs and vegetables as were stuffed into that fragile tortilla. She came back to get our empty plates, offered each of us a raspberry candy and then went outside to hail in the passing motorcyclists that were roaring through downtown slowly on a Sunday morning drive. There were swarms of motorcyclists out to take advantage of this beautiful bluebird day, and, as we left, a few came in and took our place to order their own blotos.

Trav and I decided that our next course of action would be to go to church, as we figured those Kansans who weren't riding around on their motorcycles would most likely be in a church on Sunday morning, and we wanted to meet people. I called my dad, who is a minister, to consult and see which denomination would be most likely to have the best snacks and we ended up going with the Presbityrians.

There was a great time of singing and then we sat through an interesting service in which a woman told of her recent experience with a missionary school in Guatemala. A youth group rafting trip that had been planned for the day before had been cancelled, so as we filed out of the sanctuary we grazed on all the Subway sandwiches that would otherwise be doomed to perish, as well as some excess cucumbers from a parishoners garden. Between bites we introduced ourselves to the minister and got to telling him about our project with farmers. With a light in his eye he snapped out his cell phone and called two church members who had just retired from their farm and moved into town, being 91 and 87 years old.

Don and Doris Cress are the oldest farmers that we had the pleasure of interviewing, and their stories about how things used to be were a pleasure, a history and a warning all at the same time.

Click "read more" to see what they had to say in their own words.

DORIS: Don has farmed since he was a kid. He started out by working for other people and then he...it's his story.

DON: Well, picked it up when I was about 12 years old. My dad had been farmin', and then had some family tragedies, and he quit for a few years. Started back up again and...'course he'd always farmed with horses and so we were still farmin' with horses. One reason, he liked horses, I guess. It wasn't a very big operation. One thing he did, he had a pair of mules. You know what I mean, a team. They weren't too big...oh, probably weighed 900 pounds apiece. He put me behind those mules on a walking cultivator...and I'm probably 'bout the only one in my generation that ever run one of those things.

DORIS: That's where you started your farming, huh?

DON: That's where I started. Then I was in 4-H and I had an acre pas that he turned over to me and I got to raising corn on it. But when I got out of high school...I got out of high school one week and the next Monday morning I was hired out down on the river to a fellow that needed a hand, and worked for him that summer. Next year I went to another guy and worked for him 2 years...there I was runnin' a tractor. An old Farm-All. 'Course we converted some horse equipment to tractor equipment. Horse equipment has long tongues that stuck out about 8 feet. We cut them off and made a stubby tongue so we could hitch it right behind a tractor. We did some of that and he bought some equipment that was for the tractor.

The year of '38, in which I was workin' for him, he had about 100 acres of wheat. And that's quite a bit of wheat in this area at that time. It started raining. The year before, we cut it with a binder and threshed it...but this particular year it started raining about the time he started thinking about getting the binder out. Now, you know what I'm talkin' about, a binder? Okay, this had an 8-foot table on it with canvas. It run wheat up the chute to a knotter. They'd ply it up and tie. Well, in '38 we couldn't do anything because there was a flood that was here in this town, and most places all around. So when it began to dry up, he came in to town and bought an Allis combine. I don't know if that means anything to ya. A 5-foot cut, and they were orange. Allis-Chalmers orange. And put it behind this tractor. Well, the tractor...it had wide-based flat wheels with angle-armed lugs on 'em, and about the first thing that happened, you get maybe one round around the field, and then you hit a wet spot...and then the thing go like this {cocks his head and twists his arms sideways} and just settle down. And so, he got a neighbor that had a tractor with skeleton wheels and so put him on the front, pullin' with a chain. We got along a little better. Only thing was, if we got stuck then we was really stuck. Kinda like a 4-wheel drive over a 2-wheel drive pickup! The 2-wheel drive'll get stuck pretty quick, you know, somewhere. But the 4-wheel drive'll plow on in quite a ways and then REALLY get stuck!

DORIS: Tell 'em, Don, when you started farming for yourself!

DON: Well, yeah, in '39 my family had an interesting farm. It was vacant, so to speak, so I started farming for myself. I bought one of these tractors like we had on that combine. Well the guy that had the combine, after that year was over, I spent all winter on that thing, in the shop. Those years they used to take a binder that would cut a row crop and tie it in a bundle, then shock it up in the field. Then you go through with this header on this combine with a sickle sticking out up and the sections running back and forth...it was the only one around at the time. The next year when I started I got some old horses. I got some horse machinery. I had a friend about my age, he was helpin' me, so he'd have to ride the thing.

TRAV: So, when did you two meet?

DORIS: Well, we were married in 1941 and we could afford to get married because my husband had some cattle that he had on the pasture. He raised enough profit on that to buy a ring and a little bit of furniture and we got married in the Fall. October the 21st of 1941. He had been farming a couple of years before that by himself. In '42 we had our first child and we had three children all together. The kids were active in 4-H. Are you acquainted with 4-H? There's 12 years difference between the oldest and the youngest, so we were in 4-H a long time! We went to the county fair out here just a few days ago, kind of reminiscing of when we used to go...how things have changed.

I always had a garden. That always came with being a farm wife and I raised lots of chickens. I would sell the roosters when they got to be about 3 pounds, maybe 5.

DON: Sell 'em for fryers.

DORIS: Sell 'em for fryers. 'Course we kept the pullets to lay in the henhouse in wintertime. Oh, gee! I was in what they called Extension work for several work for several years. For a farm woman that was really an outlet to her. Because most farm women didn't go to town maybe once a week or twice. But this would give us an occasion to meet with our neighbor ladies and we always had what we called a lesson. It came from K State. We had refreshments!

KACY: It was social!

DORIS: It was social.

KACY: What kind of lessons were they?

DORIS: Oh...what length should your curtains be...and what color paint would you choose...and nutrition, you'd learn about nutrition. Oh, stuff like that. We had a rural Sunday school with our kids and we all went to church. Don raised cattle here in the Bluestem area of Kansas.

DON: Yeah, south of here 'bout six, seven miles.

DORIS: In the Flint Hills area.

DON: We were right in the Flint Hills.

DORIS: People talk about the grass being the greenest it's ever been this year, 'cause we had so many snows and rain, and we just took cattle out of the pasture and they gained what they should have gained, or more, I think!

DON: Well, they hope to get 200 pounds on a 600-pound critter. And these wouldn’t have weighed six when they went in...but they weighed eight, ten comin' out! So, well, they weren't sold. They went to Western Kansas to a feedlot.

DORIS: We just recently moved to town. About 2 months. We lived where we lived for 68 years.

We sold the house and the buildings to some people and 10 acres. They're city people that like the outdoors and especially the water. We lived on a little creek called Spring Creek, which was fed by springs, and we always had good water. We always had water and we were very fortunate. People down the road were not that fortunate and not that far away from us. They didn't have water in the dry years.

DON: I always kept some riding mares and raised some colts along. Always broke 'em myself. And sometimes I'd sell them, sometimes I'd sell the older horses. They were paints. Bay and white. Had a cow herd in the '40's and they got wiped out with abortion. Then I had to go to stocker cattle again.

TRAV: How did your farm change over the years? Did you get much bigger?

DON: Well...yeah. It started out as 280 and when I's done was 460 {acres}. I added small tracts, 'cause older people would that had a small place would sell out, you know. Still got it all in a square.

TRAV: So over the years, what are the biggest issues you've had to deal with around here as a farmer?

DON: Well...the '50's were tough years. I don't know if anyone ever told you this, at least around here. Markets weren't very good and we were dry. And I took a side job along about '56, with a life insurance company. Unusual that once I got my basic training, as a fellow says, they had a problem situation in Wichita, and they sent 4 of us down there to call on the people. And that really got me started in it. I did that for about 10, 12 years, besides farming.

I was one of the first guys in the community to have a rubber-tired tractor. 'Cause that old Farm-All I was talking about, with iron lugs, that summer I cut 300 acres of wheat and oats in the community, and down in the Flint Hills, you go over the roads, poundin' those flint rocks, broke a bunch of spokes in the wheels. I'd already got the front end on rubber, so that winter I had a chance to do a trade. What it was was an Oliver, on rubber.

TRAV: What year was that that you went with rubber?

DON: Um...'40. I bought it used, and knocked a rod out, so I went and got the inserts and took the panel off and replaced all of em. Well, when I got all done, got it all buttoned up and back together, I started it up and it went "ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding," not very loud, but little but of a ping. Well, somebody said, if you just let it sit in the yard for about half a day in idle, it'll probably get over it, and sure enough it did! It had a groove in the top of the cylinder. The new bearing bein' an eighth of an inch higher the old one, it would bang the ring against that thing as the pistons went up and down. I guess that's one reason I did the swappin'. I was afraid the thing might blow up on me, give it another year.

DORIS: He also had a stagecoach. {Brings in a photograph}. We were in a parade in Lawrence and there it is, without the horses. He's got so many different things!

TRAV: How has it been for both of you, leaving the farm after so long?

DON: She's had some health problems and I can't see. So if there was an emergency I couldn't drive her to town. After we got in here, sure enough, there was. We called the amb...er, um...what do you call it?

DORIS: The ambulance.

DON: Yeah. Ambulance come pick her up.

DORIS: I have some heart problems and, like he said, he can't see to drive and I do the driving. So far we're getting on pretty good.

KACY: Did you keep...you said you sold 10 acres and buildings, right? Did you keep some land?

DON: Yeah, I kept everything else. I still got 450 acres, more or less. In recent years I sowed the farm ground for crops to brome. Brome grass. It's a tame grass, gets about that high. You cut it about wheat harvest time, bale it up, it makes wonderful hay. And then that's the end of it. In the fall, you get some rain, you might get some pasture out of it, like wheat pasture, but the farm ground's been in this brome for 10 years anyway. So, I've had a custom operator...well, a neighbor, who wanted a part of the hay, so we put it up on shares. I guess ya know what I mean, he takes some and I get some. And that's kind of the way we quit the farmin'.

So when I had a sale this spring, all that four-row equipment I had was just so much iron. Because it's so obsolete nowadays. "course I used to plant beans and 30-inch rows and so forth. Nowadays they take a drill in there, nearly as long as that van, and space them about so far apart, in rows about that far apart, just as thick as they can be. They put herbicide on the ground and that way you don't have any weeds.

DORIS: We still get income from the farm. The neighbor who buys the hay and the guy who rents the pasture for their cows. And then in the fall usually the neighbor will rent the brome grass for pasture for young stock. And so, it's worked out pretty well for us that way.

DON: ‘Course that's one of those things that're subject to change if things aren't just right. You got to have somebody that wants to do it...and the season's adaptable for it.

TRAV: Did you ever want to leave the farm? Did you ever want to do something else?

DON: Well...I had my share of doin' somethin' else with that insurance thing. I kinda got out of that and got into crop insurance. And, well...{chuckles}...somebody turned my name into a crop insurance supervisor and he came along...well it was in March of '60. We'd had snow piled up about that high on the side of the road. It started right after Christmas and never quit till the middle of March. Snowed a little every day, maybe. Couple inches or such. I lost some calves. Usually had cows bred to drop calves in March....well they did. They dropped them in the snow and that was the end of that. You know, the poor little things was settin' there...their body was warm so it'd immediately melt the snow down and they'd be layin' in a puddle of water. They'd wear themselves out. I had them out in the field...I could haul straw out, try to make a place for them, they always go off somewhere else...that's the nature of the brutes. Lost about half the calf crop out of that. That kind of encouraged me to keep doin' something else 'sides farmin'.

The crop insurance thing...they come along in April of that year, the supervisor did. Wanted to send me up north of Salina to pick up some reinstatements, of people who quit, lappsed their policy I guess you might call it. They had had 40 inches of snow up there in February and so on, when we was getting 30 inches or such. But I don't know, it just kind of worked out...I'd get enough work from that to keep goin'. I'd get my farming done.

Didn't have a lot of cattle at that time, but later I kind of started building up some cows, and 'fore it was over with in the early '80's, around '85, I had 65 head of cows. Had a cow herd that was workin' out real good and was doing some crossbreeding.

DORIS: We had short-horned cows.

DON: Well, originally, yeah. By that time I had a little bit of everything.

DORIS: Well anyway, he worked enough that three kids got a college education!

TRAV: And how long were you with Extension?

DORIS: Oh, I don't know. Hm...Thirty years maybe! I'm just making a guess, I can't remember. Oh, I expect 30 years!

We have a different situation here with our extension system. We're combining Chase County with Morris County. Where always before we had our own agents, and they were really a part of the community. I don't know just what they have now, but they're progressing, I guess, in a different manner. And the Extension program for the women is not offered anymore as far as I know of. I always thought, when I lost interest in it, that younger women than I that were coming on, most of them had some college education, where I didn't have anything like that, so it was really a blessing to me at my age. It just outgrew itself I think, the women's part.

TRAV: So, over the years, what did you really love about the farm? What really kept you there?

DON: Oh, I don't know...I grew up on a farm a quarter mile from where I lived, and it was just kind of in my blood. I like horses and...

My Uncle Walt used to say...I guess I'm kind of like him...he says, "Farming is next year's business. It's always gonna be better next year than it was this year." I didn't care to live in town.

DORIS: I never knew anything else but the farm. So, just kind of went along, year after year!

DON: Well, when I bought it I got a federal land bank loan, which was the tail end of the 4% loans down in the early '50's, or late '40's I guess it would have been. Interest was goin' up and the Federal Land Bank thing...they had started those farm loans at 4% back in the Depression, and of course when things got to gettin' better, why they just naturally increased the interest rate. The last piece of ground we bought, it was 6%, but I didn't go back to the Land Bank. Some friend of mine was taking loans for an insurance company, so I just took that.

TRAV: Was it a real hard decision for you to move to town finally?

DORIS: I don't think so.

DON: No, we were ready.

DORIS: I don't know if you want to know our ages, but Don is 91, and in a few weeks I'm going to be 87, and don't you think it was time? {Chuckles} My health problem was beginning to loom up.

DON: Last Fall, the next day after Labor Day she went to the hospital with pneumonia. She was there for 6 days and usually, pneumonia, you're out of there in 3 days! The basic problem was, they finally figured out was, she had food around her heart and lungs. They bored a hole between her ribs and her back with a syringe and sucked that stuff out of there. So...you know, it was time to quit, that's what it amounts to.

We used up about all the gas and we quit!

DORIS: 'Course the house, was a big two-story house, and it was in fair condition. We kept it up pretty well, and I had planted cedar spreaders out the back...and the people that bought it cut 'em out! And I said to my daughter, "Why?!" She said, "Because they wanted to see the creek!" I didn't think of it, but that's true, you just look right out the doors, see the creek! And that creek enticed them to buy that place.

DON: See, the creek was no farther from that house than from here to the street.

TRAV: You didn't have any trouble with flooding there?

DON: We had, a couple times.

DORIS: He was gone on insurance business, and our son was at home. He was about 15. He had 4-H stock in the barn...and it rained. And it rained, and the water came up, and it came up, and I said, "you gotta get that calf out of the barn." And he waded clear up to his waste, got the calf. And we were feeding a blind calf to butcher! And that blind calf just put his snoot right up over the back of that other calf and followed it right out!

DON: Put his nose right on the other calf's tail there.

DORIS: We had a hook in a tree where the kids would tie their calves, which he did. The water just run under that calf's belly like that...it ran for half a mile. We never, never had a flood like that! And he wasn't home! He missed it. {laughs} Oh dear!

Ordinarilly the water was really good to us.

KACY: Did you have neighbors close by?

DORIS: Mm-hm. We did have, in the kids' growing-up years. We had other little kids around us, but finally that was sold. And the man who bought it tore down the house, and so we were, I guess you could say, isolated, but didn't think anything about it. I lived there for too many years, you know, it was home! And it's a beautiful place, it really is. Lots of beautifiul trees. But they cut down my cedar.

But they like it, they really like it, and that's the way it ought to be.

DON: But they bought it the way I wanted to sell it. On the west side of the building is a road. On the east side of the building is the creek. And above the creek is a high hill covered with trees. I sold ten acres. which would have been the building, the creek, and the trees. Way I fenced it, I got to keep all the grass. That's my main interest. 'Cause it's an item you cam lease out and all you have to do is take the check to the bank when you get it. You're gonna have to build a fence once in a while, but...but this road cut off 80 acres on one side and then the creek turned and went east, and then south to the highway. West of that spot was another 40 acres of grass, set of loading pens...then up and down the creek and the field was where all the brome grass was. Then west of that again was another 240 acres of grass.

DORIS: Had to give away one of our horses.

DON: Yeah. {laughs}

He was 19 years old. He was an old horse, one of them Paint mares. He was was fool proof. In fact he was lazy. The horse market went all to pot. I don't know if you had anyone tell you that, but, for a few years you could get, oh, $1000 for most any kind of horse. Then they got to where they wouldn't let them kill 'em. Wild horses out west, in the Rockies...they used to round those up and auction off what somebody wanted and take the rest to the slaughterhouse. But they made 'em quit slaughtering 'em. So that dumped the horse market right there. Gosh, I know a guy up north that raises colts and used to get $1000, $1500 for a colt. Last year or two he couldn't get $40 or $50 bid on them.

Anyhow, back to this old horse...I give him to this fellow because I knew he'd take care of him and he'd have a place to live as long as he was able to survive. There's spots around in this country where people just shut horses in a pasture and go off and leave 'em. In the winter, and never cut the ice and never give 'em any hay or nothin'. And it's not unusual, every year the fish and game people...animal rights, or whatever it is will catch a guy on one of those deals and they'll take everything away from him and put him out of business.

I can't remember names very good anymore, to tell you what government agencies they are.

TRAV: I'm curious, from your perspective, after being involved with agriculture for so long...what would be some changes you'd like to see in the agriculture system?

DON: Oh...well, 'course my princible interest was in the livestock side of it. I guess, just to make it simple, I'd like to see them enforce the packers and stockyards act. Now, that is an old act that was put in back in 1908 or '10, or somewhere in there, to make fareness in the livestock market. But these big packers got so large and they got so united and they got in the cattle feedin' business, to where they just about run that market anywhere that they want it. 'Course supply and demand still enters in, but they are taking some of the activities away from what the small farmers would be doing in livestock.

It's one of those things where the nuts and bolts are there, but nobody'll use 'em!

You're going to get me wound up now, careful! The packers will buy off the agencies enough that they can still control the thing. These cattle I had out here, there was 130 head of 'em, and they went to Leoti, Kansas, to Cargill, which is a big cattle-feedin' outfit...they got feedlots scattered clear down to Amarillo...well, they paid a fair price. I'm not complaining about them this time, but I've seen it, times when they just bear down on ya and you couldn't get anybody to bid against them if you went to the auction. They pretty well controlled things. It isn't that way all the time. There's a livestock association, and I think they are gonna get some corrections made in it. It's just a matter of how you interpret the law, and are you willing to make it work, or able to enforce it.

TRAV: Did you feel pretty supported as farmers, in your community, and from government?

DON: Oh...yeah...I've had some government programs and they've been alright. Last year, about this time, we did a creek project, where the creek had been cuttin' into the bank, crowdin' it, and taking good field dirt, and they had a program for creek bank stabilization. That was a funny thing. Brought a guy in with a big loader. He went up on the hill in that pasture and there was a row of rimrock. He went up and started rooting those things out and they 'bout the size of that TV. He had to bust 'em up some, but he drug the dirt back and spread some out in the field and sloped the bank. And then every so far, 'bout from here to the TV, they put in a layer of rock, which runs from the bottom of the creek, up the bank, clear to the top, and it would be about 6 foot wide, and put some dirt around it. We seeded with grass, and this spring plant some trees in it.

TRAV: What do you think that the role of the farmer should be in society?

DON: In society? Well...a farmer's not very society-minded in the first place! I think they're getting organized all the time a little better, but they're getting organized commodity by commodity, like soybeans, corn, wheat, cattle, hogs...but when something important comes up in Washington that they feel is wrong they all jump in and send representatives. So, what i'm getting at, I guess, is they're coordinating their activities better than they used to. It used to be, "well I'm a soybean farmer, the heck with everybody else!" They finally figured out it don't work that way. You got to unite and you have to do that to be effective. It's a numbers game, and I'm not a politician. I never had an office of any kind. 'Course in the last few years I've listened...I'm a CNN fella, I watch quite a little bit and they get into all the nuts and bolts of stuff.

I've been in the Cattlemen's Association and so forth in recent years.

DORIS: Rural people never were accepted socially in the past the way they are now. I think maybe town people come envy the farmers some of the time. Just like this couple that bought our house, they couldn't wait to get out in the country!

DON: {laughs} Hell, we went out the back door and they come in the front door! We got out one day and they were movin' in the next morning.

KACY: And what was it like when rural people weren't as accepted?

DORIS: I think...well, Don and I both grew up during the Depression. We were talking about this the other day, what we did for entertainment was in our own community. I grew up in a house that had big rooms, one right after the other...well they wanted to come there for dances! And they'd square dance! And they'd go down the road to another farmer's house and have a square dance. And then, they had what they called a card club, and they played Rook...no, no, no, they played...Pitch! Went from house to house, and it was called the Midnight Owls. You see they played till midnight. You see farm people, they just kind of flocked together when I was little.

Now somedays we go to town, we get interested in what the school's doing and so forth. It isn't like that anymore. And farm people probably have more income than a lot of people do in town. They may not show it, but it's back there.

DON: When I was a kid, you know, a country boy was a clodhopper. Well, you know, that's kind of what town kids thought about us. I think that's changed. Main Street in this little town, they'd have to shut the doors if ever the farmers quit 'em.

TRAV: So what are you going to do now that you live in town?

DORIS: {laughs} Well, you know...we'll look at the clock! What time is it? Oh, I thought it was later than that! {laughs}

(Story about Bloody Bill and the Santa Fe Trail)

TRAV: Do you feel like farmers appreciated by people who are not farmers?

DON: Well, I think moreso than it used to be. You see, when I was a kid, about two and a half or three percent of the population were farmers. Then it got down to two. Then it got down to one and a half. But the farmers got bigger, of course. And as that transition happened, the people in town began to realize that the farmer had some importance in the community. I don't know what else to say about it.

TRAV: Did a lot of the farmers around you get out of it over the years?

DON: Well, they did 'bout like I done. They got to where they had to quit. We've got, on down Four Mile Creek a fellow's selling his grandfather's place. He runs a cow herd of a couple hundred cows. The cow business had kind of reduced. I don't know just what all has caused it.

As some old codger like me quits, nobody else wants to pick it up, apparently. There's a concern right now with people in agriculture, and the cattle industry, how we gonna keep these numbers up? Instead of exporting beef we might turn around, be importing it!

TRAV: I was wondering if you were seeing any younger folks getting interested around here.

DON: Well there's some, but not a lot. Take a guy 45 years old's considered a young farmers around here anymore. There's a few younger, but it's gonna be...like the old song goes, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm"? The investment is so terrific, and unless they can inherit something, a foundation to build onto, it's pretty tough. However, with this depression we've had, they are coming up with some beginning farmer services that they didn't have before. They're just starting to get 'em out.

There was a time after World War II, the GIs come home, tey could get a loan and start up farmin', just easy as could be if they wanted it. And a lot of them did start. I'll tell you what messed it up. Here about 10, 15 years ago the interest rates went through the roof and that pretty well stopped all this startin' up, cause the interest was killing 'em...if they could get the money. Equipment is so big anymore...

I feel like the government's gonna come in and set up some programs for first-time farmers. That's just what I hear, I don't know.

TRAV: Well, overall, are you happy?

DON: Oh, well yeah. I was happy out there...I was semi retired out there, running some cattle. Somebody asked me how come I quit handling cattle.

I said, when it got to where I couldn't tell a cow from a horse, I though it was time to quit!

TRAV: Doris, same question for you, are you happy?

DORIS: Well I guess. Maybe I don't know what unhappy really is.

A Thank-You Letter to everybody even slightly involved with this project.

2011-01-09T10:50:00.000-05:00

Many apologies for the vast delays in our blog updates! We still have many farmers to write about, from Kansas to Oregon, and from Monsanto to Farm-To-School folks. Kacy and I have both been doing plenty of writing, but neither of us are efficient at transcribing it into the internet yet. We'll improve!

Just before Christmas we spent some days writing thank-you notes and hand-addressing envelopes to every farmer we interviewed, as well as most of the people we stayed with and the individuals who connected us with farmers along the way. I'm sorry if some of you whom were key in the project have not received yours; we actually ran out of the postcard I created, which is pictured above.

Each envelope included this postcard with a personal note on the back, a copy of the individual's portrait when appropriate, and a one-page letter drafted by Kacy, which is shown below. I took the rather large stack of letters to the post office on December 23rd; I thought, "well, I've organized them by state, to help out the postal workers during this holiday rush." Feeling like a good samaritan I presented the box to the woman at the counter, and she said in a definitive southern drawl, "Aw, that's sweet of ya, darlin'...but they all get dumped in the bin anyway." And with a "whoosh!", my carefully organized pile joined the glittering mass of holiday cards and packages, bound for points across the world.

Thanks to everyone involved in the project! Please read the letter below for an update on our process.

New years resolution: post on this blog at least once a week.

Stewards: Stories and Perspectives on American Agriculture
Trav Williams and Kacy Spooner

Winter greetings!

We hope that this note finds you well and warm as December settles over your farms and towns. Some of you are good old friends and others are people whom we met only briefly for an interview this past season. This is a hearty Thank You! for being a part of our project; it’s also an update of our progress.

We traveled across the US this past spring and summer, interviewing farmers, ranchers, and other agriculturalists; our intent was to collect a diversity of views, perspectives, and creeds and to publish these conversations as an archive of modern agricultural thought.
In the end, we spoke with over 160 farmers, ranchers, scientists, homesteaders, veterinarians, viticulturalists, historians, seed-savers, editors, and agents. We traveled for about 6 months on 12,500 miles of gravel and asphalt, seeking out characters and farmers of all types; we ended up with over 350 hours of recorded conversation, from Maine to California.
The youngest farmers were working on their 4-H projects in Illinois and studying sustainable agriculture in Maine. The oldest were selling their farm in Kansas at the age of 94 or were documenting their own heritage in California. Some farmers had made their fortunes; others were losing their property or struggling to get started. Farm sizes ranged from tens of thousands of acres of rangeland in eastern Colorado to ¼ acre lots in St. Louis and Denver. Some farmers stressed localized and diversified operations, while many others focused on a single crop that was distributed worldwide, such as soybeans. The diversity within our larger agricultural community is amazing to us.
When we asked the question, “What should the role of the farmer be in our society?” a large number of people included the idea of “stewardship” in their answers. The working title of this project was “Portrait of a Farm,” but we are now leaning towards the title, “Stewards: Stories and Perspectives on American Agriculture”.

This winter we are working on obtaining further funding that will allow more interviews to take place and allow for a more complete project. We are transcribing those many hours of recorded conversation and pursuing potential publishers; we’ve begun proposing a book concept, but we will not likely have made publishing decisions before next summer.
You have helped us by either telling us your story, sharing your resources and connections with us, or providing a place to cook food or rest our heads during this trip. It has been our honor to collect your unique perspectives; we hope that they will touch and educate those who read them.

Besides the interviewees themselves, we’d also like to thank the folks who helped us find farmers; Cooperative Extension and Farm Bureau agents were particularly helpful, connecting us with numerous people and organizations. We could not have been nearly as thorough without your help.

At the conclusion of our trip, we decided to settle in western North Carolina for the time being. We are thankful to be in such a beautiful place. Travis is working with photography in Asheville and Kacy is working on farmland preservation with the Agricultural Economic Development Office in Polk County. We are happy and we’re counting on spending lots of time this winter working on this project and musing about the past and the future of American agriculture.
There’s a good chance that, in the next few years, you may find us settled on the farm Trav grew up on in Oregon, but we shall see. The soil there is fertile and the history is strong. We will continue to keep you updated about any significant progress on this project, but if you have any questions in the meantime, or if you’d like to continue to have a dialogue, please feel free to contact us anytime.

Within a day or two of today, dozens of farmers and families across the US are opening this same letter as winter approaches. Whether you are snowed in up in Maine, prepping soil in California, or watching your apple trees turn inward for the winter, know that you are a significant part of a complex and necessary system that keeps us all going. We hope that all of you and your families are well, that your crops did well, and that next season will be lucrative and satisfying.

Thanks for telling your story-- --Kacy Spooner and Travis Williams

Berger, Missouri: Wayne and Joy Carl

2010-12-26T07:49:00.000-05:00

In rural Missouri, The Carls were sitting on Joy's John Deere mule when we approached them. Joy Carl is 79 and Wayne's uncle. Wayne is Joy's right hand man on the farm. Joy showed us pictures of the county geography from an old atlas that was falling apart in his hands; he pointed out his farm and how the flooding and droughts over the years have changed the topography. In Missouri people often talk about "The Bottomlands" as an ideal area to farm, though much of it has been developed into towns and lots.

He has also seen a lot of his contemporaries drop out of farming due to floods and development, but Joy can't think of anything they'd rather be doing than farming. One thing Joy is sensitive about is the negative media attention farmers have been receiving lately. There are a few bad apples out there, but according to these men it is rare to find a farmer who would mistreat his or her animals. Joy thinks that most farmers treat their livestock with more consideration than they'd treat some people with, but that's not what society at large sees.

Berger is a town that is no longer a town; Joy reflected on the days of his youth when it has all the amenities...banks, stores, cafes...but as we left and asked which direction to town, they replied, "that way...but you won't notice."

Union, Missouri: Richard Schmidt

2010-12-14T16:09:00.000-05:00

Coming into St. Louis was a huge change from rural Illinois; luckily we had a place to stay with Carrie, my mother's best friend in the world. She offered us refuge from the unrelenting heat of July in the city. She also offered us pizza and the name of a farmer friend of hers, Richard Schmidt.

Richard and family are about 15 miles outside of St. Louis in a wealthy looking subdivision. He raises and sells beef now, but got started with food in a culinary setting. Richard is a former chef and restaurant owner who wanted to move away from urbanity in St. Louis. He found the countryside of Union and decided to try his hand at raising "good beef." That is, beef that doesn't take antibiotics, that graze for most of their food and eat grain that is grown locally.

Richard lights up with pride when he speaks about his cows, and he told us about the first cow he raised through the whole process of birth to slaughter to food. Right now Richard has seven cows, and he brought us to the barn to meet a few of them. They turned out to be shy and skittish, but Richard assured us that they get very used to him and are sweet and friendly. This business venture has proved profitable for Richard; he reports that in the 3 years he's been selling beef the public has been very willing to pay a higher price for natural beef. There is a desire to age gracefully, and having a new son keeps Richard conscious of his and his childs health.

He sent us on our way with some hardy beef jerky. We had no cooler with us and it was 100 degrees, so we devoured it quickly to the delight of our tongues and the confusion of our mostly vegetable-filled stomachs.

Freeburg, Illinois: Tom and Pat Range, Braeutigam Orchards

2010-12-06T16:08:00.001-05:00

Just as we were about to cross the state line from Illinois into Missouri we hit upon a gem for our project and our taste buds: Braeutigam Orchards run by Tom and Pat Range. We really had intended to simply pick up some fruit, but as soon as we began chatting, Pat took us over to a wall covered in old family photos. The stories started coming, so we sat at a picnic table and collected them.

They are the 6th generation on this land and obviously a holdout; the highway runs adjacent to their property and from atop their hill you can look down at the encroaching subdivisions. As we pulled up to the market at the orchard, we looked across the parking lot at a nanny goat with her babies, one of which was standing on top of her. These are the Range's fainting goats, on loan from a neighbor. The goats are a part of the agritourism that draw crowds to the orchard to pick their own peaches, blueberries and thornless blackberries. When fainting goats are startled their muscles involuntarily contract and they topple over like statues.

This orchard was started when Pat's ancestors were struggling with taking their ripe peaches to the markets and getting paid next to nothing for them. Someone had the idea of selling the peaches right from the farm, and that's what happened. The farm has a big open air structure with baskets of peaches, berries, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins and freezers with local milk and cheese and home processed jams and jellies. There are picnic tables outside and after you pick your peaches you can buy cider slushies made from the farms apples and cool off in the shade before heading home. The Ranges have worked hard to make this orchard a destination as there are other, bigger orchards in the area that attract crowds as well. Far from resenting the urban sprawl all around them they have marketed in those neighborhoods. Tom will drive down through the streets with his tractor picking up folks who want to come pick pumpkins in the fall. After all, as Tom points out, who better to bring into the farm than those who have yards planted with grass and may not have ever climbed in an apple tree.

While we are talking at one of the picnic tables a couple drives up who would like to pick some peaches. Tom leads us out to the orchard where the trees are all heavy laden with huge golden and red globes. While we look for a good place to take their portrait he picks two New Haven peaches and cuts them up with his pocket knife for us to try. There is a certain deftness with which an orchardist wields a pocketknife, born of many years leading pickers down the aisles of trees.

The peaches have a buttery sweetness and they melt in our mouths. As we head back to the table Tom picks us two more of a different variety and gives us strict instructions as to how to eat these peaches. They are Madisons, and to really get everything out of them you have to pull off the skin, put a slice on the roof of your mouth and crush it with your tongue so you can drink the peach; I can see why Tom speaks so reverently of the experience after trying a Madison this way.

Tom and Pat have kids and grandkids who already help on the farm, and will continue to run it after the elder Ranges retire. The counter is worked by high school students from the FFA agriculture classes that Tom teaches at the public school. When asked about the future of agriculture in America, the Ranges are confident that it will continue to be important as we can't survive without it. They have also seen a jump in people who care about farming even if they have no farming in their background.

As with many interviews, the topic of organics and pesticides comes up, not instigated by us. Many farmers, especially orchardists feel the need to be defensive about their practices due to heavy media scrutiny. The Ranges avoid overusing chemicals, but sometimes they simply must spray; but they are intelligent and selective about their usage. Pat pointed at Tom and said, "Here you have a man who sprays...but we eat the fruit." I recalled Reggie Rowell in Tennessee, who articulated the issue of customers wanting organic apples, but also apples without spots, damage, or scars.

Before we take off for Missouri Tom tells us that in order for each person in this country to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables every day farmers would have to plant 13 million more acres of produce. As the health of many Americans deteriorates and diet is more and more linked to disease prevention it seems natural that people will put down processed food and pick up an apple. Or a delicious, buttery peach.

Red Bud, Illinois: John Howell, Gateway FS Inc.

2010-12-05T19:14:00.001-05:00

The rain was pouring down and we were driving around with no interviews scheduled for the day but keeping our eyes open for the spontaneous opportunity. It came in the form of John Howell, a farm consultant at Gateway FS Inc., which is an agricultural chemical company that operates as a cooperative in the area. If you conjure up images of what you think a young Illinois farmer might look like you'd have some version of John Howell: very tall and broad-shouldered, with a quiet but forthright demeanor.

We dropped in just as the rain really broke, and inquired about local farmers we may be introduced to. The secretary said, "Well we got one right here! Hey John! Come meet these people." He uneasily agreed to let us interview him, occasionally shooting the secretary who had let us in dirty looks. John had recently graduated with an agricultural degree and helps on his family's farm besides his day job at FS. He loves farming and also knows the reality that his family farm can only support so many people so he is grateful and happy to work the FS job in conjunction. One of the main components of his job is to have test plots that analyze the productivity of the fertilizer the company is selling.

John reports that the results are usually positive; crops are more productive and the belief is that they would be in even better shape if they there wasn't a drought happening in Illinois right now (despite the pounding rain at the moment). He reflects on his grandfather's era, when corn production may have yielded 40-60 bushels per acre. That volume has dramatically increased in the past century, doubling in just the past 30 years. John tells us about some tests recently that have been breaking records and that we will see 250+ bushels per acre in the next decade or two (currently we see around 160-180 bushels/acre average).

He realizes that the common opinion of agricultural chemicals is negative in the public eye, especially in urbanized areas. He calls himself a realist and opines that the world will not be able to feed itself with organic methods considering our population boom. John makes the point that we either need to stop developing farms so that they can continue to meet the needs of the world (farmland preservation is a hot topic all over the country), or we need to figure out how to grow 300 bushels of corn on an acre that is only producing half that now. Which is what he's doing with his products and research

Many people are familiar with the "organic methods will not feed the world" argument. Popular media is severely slanted against high-production farming and many Midwestern farmers seem to feel demonized and misunderstood by non-farmers. They are, in general, experts at their trade, pulling corn or wheat or soybeans from their land every year for much of their lives. They are keenly aware of the issues that exist around ag, and will always remind you that they do not abuse their land or overuse chemicals for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's foolish to think that they would seek to destroy their own property, which happens to be their source of income.

As we talked to John I was reminded that farmers are divided about the reality that U.S. (and worldwide) farmland will not be able to sustain our population as it explodes. There are people like Hector Black and Jack Lazor who just want to grow a little healthy food and let the earth rest, and there are those who look into the future and fear what they see there: hungry Americans without the know-how or space to grow their own food. For those who want to prepare for the crisis they see coming, they vigorously try to protect fertile land, and they push it to grow at max capacity so that when a food shortage happens communities will not starve to death. The jobs we do and the niches we fill are varied, and the complex system of trade and transport that has developed in this nation is complex. That system gives Midwest farmers a responsibility to feed their own community as well as foreign breadbaskets. They don't take that responsibility lightly.

Benton, Illinois: J. Larry Miller, Farm Bureau

2010-12-05T16:08:00.001-05:00

Benton, Illinois has a lovely library staffed by warm and helpful folks. Upon telling the librarians about our project they consulted and came back to us with a list of farmers whom they thought would be willing and beneficial participants for an interview.

We spent a good chunk of that humid, hot day in the library. We happened to read an article in the paper by Larry Miller, Farm Bureau agent, and contacted him for an interview as well. Larry was willing and we met him at his office the next morning.

Farm Bureau provides all sorts of services to farmers, ranging from insurance for crops to political representation regarding governmental land and farm policies (it varies state-by-state). Larry fell mostly into the latter category- he is responsible for researching and weighing in on laws that will effect how farmers in his community do business. As a farmer himself, Larry understands the issues personally as well as pragmatically. In Larry's opinion it would be best to get politicians out of control in policy making and let farmers have more control over the methods they choose to farm with. This probably sounds scary to people who don't know or trust the people who grow their food, but I believe Larry thinks this would be the best way to farm because people here are neighbors, not strangers.

Larry spoke highly of the apprenticeship programs that are becoming available as many farmers are aging without heirs to keep the farm going. The programs match younger people without the means to buy/rent a farm with older farmers who wish their farms to remain farms but have no one in line to take it over after their retirement.

Illinois farming has been particularly hit hard in this recession; the university extension budget has all but dried up and in some parts of Illinois one extension agent services 5 counties. Farm Bureau and other farm-advocate organizations have been similarly affected. 700,000 people leave Illinois every year and part of Larry's goal is to figure out ways to make farming and community here lucrative. If the farmers can't survive in Benton the prognosis for the town will be dire because as Larry said "farming is the backbone of this community."

Owensboro, Kentucky: Harry Young

2010-09-15T16:06:00.001-04:00

We spent a few days in Kentucky visiting a friend of Trav's named Ana who is spending a season at Mammoth Cave National Park. We hiked and looked for ginseng and toured a cave that is part of the 400 miles of the underground cave system in the park. It was awesome.

Just before we left Kentucky for Illinois we stopped in Owensboro to meet 83 year old soybean and tobacco farmer Harry Young. Mr. Young's story is vastly different from any other farmers we had met; he has a twisted tale of loss and racism, and his story seems unbelievable and definitely tragic. The story starts with the town he grew up in, which he describes as a place riddled with race discrimination and power struggles. There was the story about the white drunk driver who hit and killed a black child and got off with 30 days in jail, compared to the young black man who hit and destroyed a telephone pole and got 3 years in jail.

Harry said he has been a farmer since he was 4 and farming is in his blood. He had accumulated 289 acres that he farmed soybeans on until 2005 when everything changed. The government called in a loan that Harry said he already paid off and even had the receipt for, which he showed us. He has a copy of it blown up and posted on signboard in his front yard to advertise his unfair treatment at the hands of the government. The government insisted that Harry had an outstanding bill due and foreclosed on his property and assets.

Harry's brother was able to buy him a house, so he has at least something to his name, but all the farm equipment was confiscated and, according to Harry, undersold to friends of the local police and politicians. The legal battle to prove that he had paid his bill has been an ongoing nightmare for Harry, and his loss has been extreme. Signs decrying the local government adorn his front yard and inside his house the table tops and bookshelves are totally buried under stacks of papers, all legal documents. His wife left because "this has been trying," yet Harry continues to fight to get his farm back. Last year he spent 3 days sleeping on the floor of the local jail for making "terroristic threats" to a government official, and even though he was cleared for those charges at his trial he says he is still treated like a criminal. When we asked Harry if he ever thinks about leaving the area he looked at us incredulously and said "where would I go?"

There is an steadfast optimism to Harry despite the mess he has been through. He signs every letter (and he writes many letters to congressmen, senators, NAACP, the Obamas, etc, daily) with the phrase "God is forever good" and he recognizes that at least God and nature aren't prejudiced- his neighbor needs rain just as bad as he does.

There is another positive note to the story; while Harry does not have land of his own to farm anymore, he does farm his brothers 75 acres close to town. When asked what he would like to have happen in this situation Harry sighed and said that he would of course like to have his land back, but until then he would like people to tell his story so that maybe one day someone who can do something about the injustices will be listening, and be able to help. May it be so.

Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee: Jeff Poppen, Long Hungry Creek Farm

2010-09-15T16:05:00.002-04:00

We heard of Jeff Poppen as "the Barefoot farmer" when we were in Asheville and were told that we should really try to meet this amazing man. We stepped onto his front porch and let ourselves in to find Jeff in the kitchen teaching his girlfriend's son to make pickles. Jeff's appearance is worth describing; he wears large round glasses and has long hair tied back in a ponytail with an equally long beard on his face that culminates in one massive dreadlock. Jeff seemed reluctant to talk at first and it felt like we were questioning him without much success until after a fine supper of corn, salad, and beets. An aside: at one point during the pickle making Jeff very adorably excused himself from the kitchen telling us "I'm going to go kiss my girlfriend."

So, while Jeff was very generous and hospitable, it didn't seem like we were getting too much information from him with his monosyllabic answers to our questions until he started talking about his compost and the quality of his soil. Like many of the farmers we have met, Jeff displayed his love for dirt by crouching down and lovingly picking up a handful, then crumbling it out through his fingers. His face looked radiant as he beamed up at us and told us that the dirt is what its all about; healthy soil equals healthy plants. When asked about issues in farming today Jeff replied that "there are no more farmers" because dumping chemicals on the ground doesn't count as farming.

What's your background? How'd you get into this?

I've been a farmer all my life.

In Chicago?

Near Chicago.

I'm guessing, but was it corn?

My dad had a horticulture operation; he was a nursery man. But it was in corn country.

And what do you do here? Seems like everything.

I've been running a small farm here since 1974.

Just produce?

It's a beef, a cow/calf operation. And gardens.

Do I understand it's a biodynamic focus?

I make biodynamic preparations and use them on my farm.

Is that something that your family did or something you got into yourself?

The latter.

Why do you choose to do it that way?

I don't use the calendar. I do it because it treats the soil as if it mattered and makes good quality vegetables. I like the way the vegetables taste.

So...is this a farming community?

Back in the old days it was. When I moved here. There is no farming in America anymore to speak of.

What do you mean by that?

Probably because I don't travel. I have a narrow definition of what farming is.

So what kind of changes would you like to see in the ag system to fit your definition?

There's only one thing that needs to happen in my opinon, mainly. And that is we have to return the cows to the farm.

You don't think people are doing that?

No. Most of our livestock are in confinement operations. And it's a way to concentrate wealth. Because when humans are allowed to live, they will have animals and crops in rotations on pieces of land. Agriculture is free. And there is no selling of produce. Produce has never been sold. And it shouldn't ever be sold. The fruits of agriculture are to be free, and this is the way it's always been. And wealth is relatively new. It wasn't uncommon a hundred years ago for people to inherit a lot of money and just say, "we don't want it." Why would you want a bunch of money? That just entails responsibilties...cause there's no place to spend it. It required...well, it was a lot of trouble. When food can't be sold, starvation ceases.

Do you see the importance of the cow on the farm as the nutrient cycling? Is that why you think it's important, to close your circles?

Well, the way I look at it, the dawn of civilization and the domestication of animals, arose hand in hand, and humanity can't live without ruminants. Mainly because a ruminant can live off a couple acres of land but make twice that much land per... So this necesitates every community having cattle and moving them around in such a way that fertility increases, and consequently there is a possibility of crop production, and then when crops are removed from the community, you're simply removing carbohydrates, staches, sugars, and proteins in a form that are basically carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, that all come free from the air and the water. And there's no expense whatsoever except nature and human labor. Other recent usurps of agriculture by the great pirates and the commodification of agriculture.

So how do you fit yourself in as a farmer? I'm assuming you have an income in some form through it.

Well, what I do is I have a farm budget of about a hundred grand a year and I have 200 families that are willing to give me 20 bucks a week for 25 weeks and they have all the vegetables that they need and I give everything else away and there's a sort of a free flow...I just load vegetables up every few months and send them down to Nashville and they take them home and have to give them to their neighbors and distribute them. It's a way of distributing food freely. And then, if at the end of the year I have money in the bank, then I do it again. People are pretty anxious to keep me in business.

You said you're a cow/calf operation. Are you selling your cows as well?

I sell a little bit of organic beef on the market. I believe that cattle are there just to inrease the fertility, not to make money.

There a lot more CSAs popping up all over the place. Do you think that's a good thing?

Yes.

How many acres are you working here?

The farm is 300 acres. I have about about a 100 ares of pasture and a couple hundred acres in forest, and maybe 8 acres of produce.

So you've been doing this how many years? 35?

Yeah.

So did you start with that same view on CSAs and cattle or has it changed?

No, I was a truck farmer most of the time. I started the CSA in 99 or 2000, somewhere around there, and it arose out through the biodynamic movement. And as insight of the different roles that farmers and nonfarmers play in a community. A farmer {?? with the forces of nature and PROduction. These forces of nature are dealt with in a way that requires a farmer's attention and intuition and spiritual insights. The rest, after the produce is cut, it's all a matter of REduction, and these are forces of humans taking the produce and distributing it, transportation...

So these forces are generally human forces and the farmer should have nothing to do with it. Whenever a farmer takes stuff to the market, they ruin the whole thing because there's all this produce there. And the farm should be looked upon as a self contained individuality, where everything that's needed for agricultural production comes from within the farm's borders, through the rotation of crops, and animals, and pastureland and this kind of stuff. When it's viewed that way, you can sort of see that the farm itself really just runs on itself and just excess carbon, all this free stuff leaves it; nothing changes. And that way you have "farming" because you're making something from nothing. And then you have wealth created in a given area. And this is the way civilizations have built up. And this is the way that...by destroying that you just destroy civilization. And this is what is happening right now.

So, if people are growing things, removing them from the farm and selling it elsewhere do you think it's possible to close loop some farms? Because even if the majority of it is carbon and things, there's all the other nutrients.

Well, it's impossible not to.

So do you think everybody should be farming then?

I think one person can farm enough for, I don't know, 50 or 100 people. Not all of them have to be a farmer.

You kind of told me what the role of the farmer is with the land...what do you think the role of the farmer is in society?

Well, the farmers are priests. And they're responsible for the incarnation of material.

And what kind of farming are other people doing (in this community)?

Nobody farms. There's no farming anymore. I don't call buying chemicals and Monsanto seed and throwing it out there and shipping feed to Texas feedlots, I don't call that faming. I think that's a blatant ripoff.

So how would you encourage more people to farm?

Blow two bridges up in St. Louis, I think would do it. I think to outlaw any corporation over 150 people. Close down all the WalMarts, that kind of stuff. Just have general depression.

Think that'll inspire more people to be more individualistic?

Well, you know, you can look at the model of Russia. 20 years ago we thought they were all gonna starve and the government said, "we're not gonna take care of you anymore," and they gave people land...and 90% of potatoes grown in Russia are never on the market, they're just grown in home gardens. If you don't sell food, people will grow it. They're not going to starve to death. They're smarter than that. And if they can't get chemicals, they'll figure out how to have animals and do it. So the way to encourage people to farm, the only way, is to get the animals out of the feedlots and back onto the land and then shut down the interstate system. And that, I assumed would have happened by 1975, 76, but is hasn't. That's why I don't prophesize much.

I like what you say, that people will know what to do, and they're smart enough...

Oh they're totally intuitive and everybody knows how to farm. It's just a generation or two back. Gotta get that soil humus; got to get that soil nice and fluffy, keep it healthy.

Are you happy with how things have worked out on this farm for you?

I'm generally a happy person.

Do you want to get any bigger?

I decided a few years ago that getting bigger was not what I needed to do; what I decided to do instead was to start other farms. Made no sense burning myself out and really there needs to be more farms. So I have a focus of raising farmers. I've taught a lot of people how to farm.

Do folks come and stay with you here and learn off this land or do you go stay with them and teach them there?

I do both, I mean I start farms when people pay me. I charge money, and then they take my tractors and make compost.

Those that you've started, do you think that people like and stick with the model that you set or do they want to get more commercial with it?

Um...I'm pretty outspoken about the noncommercialization of agriculture and it seems to be fairly popular with the people that I'm dealing with. I don't know, that may be just lucky. But there is a...it's foolish to try to make money in farming. Farming is for the lifestyle that allows a whole lot of people to live on the land as in a welfare system, where they don't really have to do anything. They can just lay around and smoke pot and drink beer and jump in the creek and meditate and read and, you know, play guitar, and just kind of hang out. I mean that's what farms are for. And most people need to do much anyway. And then every now and then the farmer rounds them all up and you plant a big field oryou harvest a big field; we don't need all those people most of the time. But the corporate model necessitates unemployment, poverty, starvation, and then a very extensive welfare system, prisons, and all that.

I know you say you don't prophesize, but can you see that happening, the shutting down of the corporate structure?

There are more prisoners today than there are farmers. Unbelievable. If you told me that when I was a kid, I would have just said, "no way." I have no idea what's going on.

What do you do for fun around here?

Farm.

How many head of cattle did you say you have?

I didn't say. There's about 50. Well, that's including calves. About half of that would be the correct answer, I suppose.

Are you able to manage that yourself?

I have two hired hands. And I have a lot of community support. Again, what I do is I come off of my hills with vegetables every day and I go through town, stop to get beer or whatever, and anybody, neighbors or friends from around here, is welcome to have anything off the truck that they please. Becasue I feel like it's my job to get money from the city to bring it in to Red Boiling. And then that makes me popular. And it makes it so that if I have any troubles I just go ask people and they're like, yeah, sure. And that's the way that communities work and farmers are always...sort of a typical way to run a farm. You don't try to make money, you just try to keep it going every year.

When Jeff was 19 he and his brother went in on Long Hungry Creek Farm together. He still is at it with his cow/calf operation and his vegetable CSA. He has several helpers who are around college age and Jeff likes to talk about the idealism of the farming lifestyle. His helpers get to swim in the river and lay in the hammock and take care of the vegetables when they need it. It is a beautiful way to live a slow paced life in this case. Jeff often drives through the town of Red Boiling Springs giving away his vegetables out of the back of his truck because he thinks everyone should have good food even if they can't pay for it.

He practices biodynamic farming, based largely on Rudolph Steiner's classic writings. To Jeff, the presence of the cow on the farm is tantamount, as they complete the cycling of nutrients from soil to food to soil again. His 300-some acres are mostly wooded and pastures, with 1-acre patches of vegetables scattered about in fences.

He has very stong beliefs about the capitalistic systems in which we live.

We walked down the long rows of lettuce that were unfortunately flooded and unsalvagable to the potato/squash cave on the left. Jeff and a little girl who was visiting disappeared inside and came back out with arms full of yellow squash to load into her mom's truck. It feels like it's about 50 degrees inside the cave, perfect for root storage.

The barefoot farmer has at this point turned downright friendly and, as it was evening, he invited us to stay the night on the farm so we wouldn't have to navigate in the dark. It's a tempting offer with the fireflies flashing and the bubbling clear stream, but instead we take Jeff's picture and head on down the road with him calling out "peace and love!" after us.

Grassy Cove, Tennessee: John Kemmer

2010-09-15T16:05:00.001-04:00

Our next visit was with John Kemmer in his general store in Grassy Cove, Tennessee. Like any rural area in this country, where decedents of pioneers and settlers still populate the land, many people share last names and are distant cousins here. There are a lot of Kemmers in this county and their presence here goes back hundreds of years to when the area was first settled.

The inside of the store conjures up a bygone era; shelves stacked with dusty green glass bottles, old fashioned bristle brushes for shaving, Liberty overalls and hats, hunting gear and yellowed pictures hanging on the wall of the first Kemmers in the area. John himself is seated in a comfortable-looking chair behind the counter surrounded by haphazard stacks of books that he reads as he waits for customers.

He is quiet and seems mildly inquisitive about the two of us poking around his store, asking him questions about his farm. John tells us he doesn't really like being a farmer- he much prefers the store. He has downsized his operation from 200 head of cattle to 80, and if his daughter isn't interested in taking it over, he will happily sell the cows and quit farming. Government intrusion is an issue that has been rough on John; even in his store he has felt the tightening of the governmental leash in areas like the ability to sell food (We had hoped for some ice cream, but found only a non-working freezer).

John was the first farmer we talked to who was really "over" farming and ready to get out of it. He's ready to sell it all, buy an RV and wander the country, but his daighter's interest in inheriting it keeps him there. The general store seems to be less a business and more a place to keep the physical records of a fading history. One mile down the road, his cousin, George Kemmer also keeps a similar store, with an equal amount of antiquities and artifacts.

Before we left, we bought an Italian bristle brush and I caught sight of an arial photo of the Kemmer farm tacked up to the wall where only John could really see it from behind the counter. It made me think that even though John is ready to be done farming, he retains a love for the land that has been in his family for so long.